February 26, 2008: the day music bloggers all over the world threw up in their mouths a little. That was when the New York Times reported the rumor that Warner Brothers is negotiating with celebrity blogger and fashion disaster Perez Hilton to give him his own imprint at the label—a deal that would effectively turn a guy who’s most famous for using Microsoft Paint to scribble jizz on the faces of celebrities he thinks are gay into a for-real music-industry player.
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What actually prompted me to revisit the Hilton piece was a February 27 Times item about another entertainment megacorp wooing another celebrity I can’t stand by inviting him to get his feet wet in the music biz. In this case the story was about Sony’s desperate attempts to persuade Jay Leno to do a syndicated program for them after his tenure at The Tonight Show ends next year—they’re offering him pretty much anything he could want, including “financial interest in Sony music artists who appear on his show.” The music-related parts of Sony’s proposal are pretty incidental, but they did get me thinking seriously about what Warner might hope to get out of Hilton.
Perez Hilton has zero credibility among music tastemakers, but his blog pulls multiplatinum numbers. Despite its often adolescent crudity, it has an eerie power to make and break trends among the much larger group of people who aren’t musical tastemakers, with an estimated 2.8 million unique visitors per month—about twice as much traffic as Pitchfork. Hilton is like everybody’s catty gay friend, and his obsessive posts about Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse probably deserve some credit for breaking both artists in the States—even though he only occasionally touched on their music. Hoping to benefit from that influence, Warner has reportedly offered Hilton $100,000 a year as an advance against a 50 percent cut of any profits his signings might generate.
The latest news is the April 7 launch of Pitchfork.tv, the Pitchfork empire’s all-music, all-the-time online TV network. It promises music-related movies, artist interviews, live footage, behind-the-scenes stuff, and of course traditional short-form music videos, all for free. This is a gutsy move for a couple reasons. First, video outlets devoted strictly to music don’t tend to survive that way. For all its cultural impact, MTV couldn’t stay focused on music, and neither could its imitators, competitors, and spin-off channels—they’ve all been overrun by reality programming or succumbed to a broader, shallower obsession with pop culture.
