Consequence

About Consequence

Consequence is a Chicago, Illinois-based music and entertainment news website covering music news, album reviews, film, television and pop culture. It began in September 2007 as Consequence of Sound, a music blog founded by Fordham University sophomore Alex Young, and grew from a dorm-room hobby into one of the most widely read independent music publications on the internet. Now publishing simply as Consequence, it operates the Consequence Podcast Network, covers nearly every major music festival in North America, and remains independently owned under its founder, who serves as CEO and publisher.

Founding at Fordham

Consequence of Sound started in September 2007. Alex Young, then a sophomore journalism major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center in New York, started the site in his spare time because, as he later put it, he was bored. It began as just a hobby — a music blog with no business plan and no staff. Young met a would-be contributor named Mike on the message boards for Chicago's Lollapalooza festival; Mike wanted to write, came aboard, and brought his friends with him. The site, Young recalled, evolved into something real rather quickly: it went from a small, unplanned thing to a full-fledged job. By his junior year he was dedicating around 40 hours a week to it, and even more in his senior year. He graduated from Fordham in 2010 and made the site his full-time job.

Rapid growth

The site's growth was explosive. When Consequence of Sound marked its fourth anniversary on September 15, 2011, it had published nearly 17,000 articles and worked with more than 100 different writers, editors and photographers. Its staff had covered major music festivals across the country — from South by Southwest in Austin to Bonnaroo in Tennessee to Lollapalooza in Chicago — along with block after block of daily news stories, album release schedules and reviews. The anniversary post captured the site's ethos: "It's the journey that is mind-boggling. The steps count. The turns matter. The articles entertain." What had started as one bored sophomore's Saturday-afternoon project was, four years later, a genuine media operation.

Early recognition

The industry noticed. In December 2010, Consequence of Sound was named the Top Music Blog in About.com's 10 Top Blogs of 2010 — an honor the site celebrated with the observation that it simply confirmed what its readers already knew. The award recognized the site's formula: fresh news and thoughtful reviews combined with practical features like a concert calendar, an upcoming-release calendar, an online store and its Festival Outlook coverage. The following year, Young entered the site in the Fordham Business Plan Competition, the university's entrepreneurship contest, whose winner received a $10,000 cash prize plus legal, accounting and advising services. The college hobby was becoming a real business.

Festival coverage as a signature

Festivals have always been at the heart of Consequence's identity. From its earliest years the site covered nearly every major American music festival — the barbecue-laced sprawl of SXSW, the muddy confines of Bonnaroo, the concrete jungle of Lollapalooza — and its festival reporting became a signature strength. The site's writers have traveled to almost every state in America covering live music, and its festival guides, lineup analyses and on-the-ground reviews made it an essential resource for live-music fans. That festival DNA runs through the company to this day: its podcast network grew directly out of its Bonnaroo coverage.

Expanding beyond music

As the publication matured, it broadened its scope. The site that began as Consequence of Sound — devoted to covering nearly all genres of popular music — expanded into film, television and broader entertainment coverage, and eventually rebranded to the simpler Consequence, reflecting its wider remit. The rebrand acknowledged what the site had become: not just a music blog but a full-fledged entertainment publication. Even so, music remains its core — its reviews, news and festival coverage are still the engine of the operation, and its editorial voice still carries the enthusiast's passion of its founding.

The Consequence Podcast Network

Consequence operates the Consequence Podcast Network, a slate of music and culture podcasts. Among its shows is The What Podcast, which launched in 2018 as a project of two Bonnaroo veterans talking about the thing they love most — the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival — and evolved to cover the broader North American festival landscape and touring industry. The show features interviews with artists such as Radiohead's Ed O'Brien, Lizzo and Deftones' Sergio Vega, as well as industry figures like Ashley Capps of AC Entertainment and Jim Burress of Columbia Records. In July 2021, founder Alex Young joined the show for a wide-ranging conversation about the origins of Consequence, the state of music journalism and the post-COVID festival landscape. The network reflects the company's strategy of meeting its audience across formats.

Newsletters and reader products

Like many digital publishers, Consequence has built direct relationships with its audience beyond the homepage. The site publishes Consequence Daily, a daily newsletter previewing its coverage, and has developed personalization features that let readers follow favorite artists, topics and events and customize a "My Content" page. These reader products — newsletters, personalized feeds, community comments — reflect the company's long-running strategy of turning casual visitors into a loyal community, the same community-building instinct that drove the site's growth from a dorm-room blog into a full media operation.

A founder's philosophy

Young has been candid about the publications that shaped his ambitions. Writing about the upheaval in music media, he described his relationship with Pitchfork — long the dominant force in online music criticism — as that of a competitor who nonetheless owed it an enormous debt: the earliest iterations of Consequence of Sound emulated much of what Pitchfork did, from editorial voice to content strategy to packaging a love of music in a compelling way. His agitation at being scooped or out-reviewed, he wrote, was rooted in a simple desire: to be as good as Pitchfork. Achieving that standard pushed him for years. The tribute captures something essential about Consequence's place in the ecosystem — an independent publication built in dialogue with, and in rivalry against, the giants of music media.

Leadership and independence

Alex Young founded Consequence in 2007 and continues to lead the company, serving as CEO and publisher while overseeing day-to-day editorial content, traffic growth and business development. He is based in Philadelphia. Unlike many of its peers — Pitchfork sold to Condé Nast; countless music blogs were shuttered or absorbed — Consequence has remained independently owned and operated for its entire existence, a rarity in digital music media. That independence has allowed it to maintain its voice and its festival-first identity through nearly two decades of upheaval in the music industry and the media business alike.

Place in music journalism

Nearly twenty years after a bored Fordham sophomore started a blog on a Saturday afternoon, Consequence stands as one of the enduring independent voices in American music journalism. It occupies a middle ground that has become increasingly rare: bigger and more professional than a bedroom blog, independent in a landscape of conglomerate-owned culture publications, and devoted to the proposition that enthusiastic, knowledgeable coverage of music — from breaking news to festival mud — is worth doing well. The official website is at consequence.net.