Zoom-in Online

This blog post was submitted by Max Willens, ZIO's Music Channel Assistant.

Everybody knows that music magazines are dying. Just head to any book or record store (assuming, of course, that you can still find one) and check out the racks. The advertising is drying up, the readers have moved on, and really, it's only a matter of time.

If you talk to the generation of writers who wrote for those magazines, a lot of them will tell you that proper music journalism is going the way of all flesh, too. In the future, they croak, every music review will be 140 characters or less! It's going to be nothing but blogs written by rich, air-headed teenagers! Culture is dying! You kids have ruined everything!

Like most things that older people tell you, this is wisdom to be taken with a grain of salt. True, the sage, long-form profiles by authors like Greil Marcus and the impassioned, fevered meditations on rock 'n' roll culture by people like Lester Bangs are probably never coming back.

But there is plenty of excellent music coverage to be found on the Internet. Some of it is straighter and more journalistic, some of it is freer and more fan- and musician-oriented, and The Independent's Elisa Bray has compiled a very solid list of the top 25 music sites on the Internet. If the list ran all the way to 30, we'd humbly suggest adding sites like Dusted Magazine and Clash Music, and if we could turn back time, we're sure the dearly departed Stylus would have made the cut too.

So if you're sick of reading Pitchfork and listening to Last.fm all the time, just know that there are other options out there, and the options are better than Buddyhead.