His videos follow a simple format: Fantano talks into a camera about songs and records while providing context and highlighting things he did and didn’t like. Numbers aren’t everything, but there is a strong case for him as modern music’s most successful individual critic, with a reputation tied to no entity but his own. Users spent an average of four minutes on each video-an engagement time many website editors would die for.
From mid-September to mid-October, The Needle Drop collected around 5.1 million views. In a supposedly democratized media landscape where anyone can build a following, Fantano’s viewership numbers breathe life into the Silicon Valley clichés. It’s abnormal for an independent music critic to draw this sort of attention, but Fantano has emerged from the gauntlet of personal fan blogs and amateur commentariat to become his field’s first superstar.
Later, she told Fantano she’d accidentally swiped into the stranger’s photos folder and found it full with photos of him, portending ominous usage of the new pic. Fantano’s then girlfriend-now his wife-offered to take the photo, only to laugh when she used the guy’s phone. One time at South by Southwest, a fan asked for a picture with him. It was a tame interaction, Fantano later told me. “I’m not that famous,” Fantano said with a smile, before thanking the pair and saying goodbye. When asked if he lived nearby, Fantano offered the evasive answer of “I live in Connecticut.” The student seemed legitimately blown away, but his friend, an Asian woman in a windbreaker, didn’t know who Fantano was. First, a stocky record seller in a Japanese Pink Floyd shirt stared at him for a beat before snapping to recognition and shouting: “Anthony Fantano!” Then, a floppy-haired college student gaped as Fantano walked by and gushed, “Oh my God, it’s Anthony Fantano.” It didn’t take long for a couple fans to recognize Fantano. “I didn’t know it would become this popular when I started and I don’t know how popular it could become in the future,” he said while flipping through records from the Fugs and Devo. As we walked, we discussed the Needle Drop, which has, since its launch in 2009, grown from a part-time hobby into a full-time job, netting millions of views, hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and enough ad revenues to support his family. Fantano was hunting for records to feature on “Vinyl Update,” a recurring segment in which he unpackages and reviews new purchases. On a blustery New England afternoon, Fantano and I attended the WESU Fall Record Fair, an annual vinyl dealers event at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Pale, round, buzz cut-he resembles a default avatar in the create-a-player segment of a videogame, his face framed by big, blocky glasses.
It’s an interesting cranium, easily reduced to a black-and-white cartoon outline of a bald man screaming in anger, which serves as Fantano’s online profile picture. Watch one of his videos, and his head will stick in your brain.
BIG QUINT INDEED is an excitable Californian who shakes with glee as he sinks into a song he loves Dead End Hip-Hop is a roundtable of five wizened rap heads whose tastes play to the Whatever happened to the real hip-hop? crowd.īut the most popular music vlogger, and certainly the most recognizable, is Anthony Fantano, aka The Needle Drop. Among this burgeoning scene, a handful of stars have begun to emerge. A new era of music critics has mostly given up writing about the art form to put their faces front and center on YouTube. Most music critics are writers, and by nature, writing is a private profession done best behind the privacy of a computer screen-no face required. In the current media environment, a critic’s visibility takes another form-Twitter followers, bylines, masthead associations. Long gone are the days where a critic might gain the kind of fame that would beget Philip Seymour Hoffman playing them in a movie, or appearances to quip about ‘80s ephemera on VH1 talk shows. Music criticism isn’t much of a job for those who seek the celebrity that comes with being instantly recognizable.