If you're an indie rock fan of a certain age, the name Stereogum will likely evoke strong feelings. The site was launched “on January 1, 2002, on a whim,” said founder Scott Lapatin. Edge. Initially, this early product of the music blog era focused almost entirely on musical discovery and MP3 placement. “It was the early days of Windows Media Player and Real Player,” Scott recalls. Today, the site focuses on music journalism and has just relaunched to keep up with the media landscape overrun by artificial intelligence.
Lapatin was with Stereogum from the very beginning and watched as the world of music and media quickly changed around him. Although he sold the site in 2006 and saw it change hands several times in the following years, he bought it back from its previous owner in 2020, making it perhaps the most popular bastion of independent music journalism on the internet.
Nearly 24 years later, the site has seen some of the most significant changes since it stopped hosting MP3s. Some of these changes, such as the new backend, are virtually invisible to readers, but Lapatin says the new site loads faster and has fewer errors. The site has undergone updates, added a dark mode and shifted the focus to subscriptions.
Obviously, says Lapatin, “the biggest change is streaming.” Stereogum came out a few years before Spotify, so the novelty of releasing a song you might not hear anywhere else was enough to help it gain a lot of fans. “The rule used to be: no interviews or anything like that,” he says now, “I have a team of professional music writers, so there’s a lot more context and understanding.”
However, the site's latest update was not driven by music streaming platforms, but by artificial intelligence. “Google's move to AI-powered search cut our ad revenue by 70 percent. Previously, Facebook and X's deprioritization of links also hurt, but I can't downplay the brutal impact of the AI review,” Lapatin said in his article. message about site restart. However, even beyond reviews, Lapatin believes that artificial intelligence is reducing the usefulness of these platforms. Every time he logs on to Facebook, he says he's bombarded with videos “of Ozzy coming back from the dead and hugging a little girl. It's hard to believe that these platforms allow themselves to be turned into slop warehouses.”
In our interview, he also made it clear that while he believes AI has its place, it doesn't come first. Stereogum. “I’ve never used it for anything creative, and none of our writers use it for newsgathering or writing articles,” he said, noting that “sure, it sucks to compete with AI-generated articles… but that’s the reality.”
As with many other retail outlets, Stereogum is moving to a subscription-centric model. (Edge launched my own subscription program in December 2024.) As advertising revenue dried up and AI reviews cut into search traffic, many sites turned to their loyal fans to help them stay afloat. Lapatin says there has been some limited backlash, but “I hope our audience understands that in order to get what they feel is unique from Stereogum, they need to support us.”
He notes that while people have gotten used to getting everything online for free over the last 25 years, people used to pay for music magazines. In the 1990s, you had to go to the store and pay for a copy of CMJ New Music Monthly. Stereogum will still offer some content for free, but “there is a certain percentage of readers that we need to pay in order to exist. We need to pay our writers,” Lapatin says.
He knows there are a lot of places competing for your subscription dollar these days. Websites, podcasts, substacks are moving to a paid subscription model. “We think the future is people-driven music writing,” says Lapatin, “and to be clear, there are a lot of places doing that. There are great newsletters and other independent sites.” But he notes that many major music publications are owned by giant conglomerates. And he doesn't believe these outlets are always honest. “I think a lot of people don't realize how much of the music journalism they see these days is either secretly paid for or done dishonestly.”
Lapatin says his goal has always been to operate transparently. He wants Stereogum you want to talk to a friend who goes to concerts and tells you about cool things on Bandcamp. Ultimately, he wants to connect with readers, help them find good music, and do it in a personal way. This human factor is key because, as he says, “I have never met anyone algorithm“
