I spent 10 years interviewing biggest pop stars and electronic music stars. My conclusion?..

Interview is one of those genres music journalist has to work most often with. To conduct the interview, there should be a significant occasion - for example, when the artist records a new album, or sets off on a world tour, or opts for a long creative vacation, or ...

The initiative for conducting interviews can come from both the media and the artist's manager. The press agent of the artist, as a rule, calculates the approximate number of interviews that a star can and should give to promote a new step in his career, and then selects the media to be invited for the interview. The main criteria for the selection are the coverage, the style and the reputation of the medium, as well as the personal relations of the PR person with journalists (in show business, much is arranged via personal friendship).

The purpose of the interview in show business isn’t either to make a star confess or to answer provocative questions in a sincere manner. Interview is just one of promotion tools, and every word in it should work for the artist’s benefit. Therefore, questions are formulated not with the purpose of unearthing something interesting and exclusive, but in such a way as to give the star maximum opportunities to expose himself or herself in a favorable light.

Interview is usually conducted in one of three formats:

Personal meeting
Calling (phone, Skype, Whatsapp or whatever)
Sending written answers by e-mail

Beginners in journalism are delighted with the opportunity to personally meet their idol. Meetings usually take place in a dressing room or a hotel lobby, their time is strictly limited - no more than 15 minutes, sometimes less. The journalist usually does not receive direct contacts of the star - he keeps in touch with the manager of the artist, who in most cases sits next to the star throughout the interview.

The manager, in particular, ensures that the journalist does not ask wrong questions, and helps the star with an answer in case the tricky journalist still managed to ask something extraordinary. In my practice, for example, it was so that before a personal interview with Dita von Teese I was warned several times: don’t ask questions about her ex-boyfriend, Marylin Manson. During an interview with Hardwell I asked about his favorite forbidden pleasure - Hardwell hesitated, and the manager began to prompt: "Beer, beer! Hardwell, say it's beer! ". He said so, this version was published in the interview.

When a journalist ‘grows up’ and becomes lazy, he tends to be more favourable towards written interviews: it does not need to be transcribed from an audio record, and requires only minimal editing. The journalist makes a list of questions, receives the answers on the mail, inserts absent commas, adds a lead and pushes ‘Send’ happily, ready to get the same fee as for all those efforts invested in a personal interview.

The problem with the interview via mail is that the musicians are too lazy to spend half a day at the computer, scribbling detailed answers. They prefer to do away with stereotyped phrases even when they really have something to say on this or that occasion. They type their answers most often on the run and when there is nothing else to do - for example, while waiting at the airport. The trained eye of a professional can easily determine if the journalist and the artist talked face-to-face or ... or ... when it was the manager who compiled the answers instead of the artist.

In show business, an interview has mutated from a genre that allows you to get the most out of a person to the state of the most superficial text you can imagine. Only advertising slogans are more superficial. Exceptions, fortunately, exist - yet they depend not on the journalist, but on the speaker. This is the genre which delivers deep dissatisfaction to ideological journalists who came to show business in search of what was bever truly meant to be there.