Excellent point. Pop music magazines of the '60s usually printed just what the labels' PR people wanted them to print, adding innocent bits of gossip (always positive) about the performers' off-stage lives. They were barely a rung above pro wrestling magazines on the believability scale. By the mid-'70s, serious music journalism was being done in Rolling Stone, Creem (albeit with an irreverent attitude), and other magazines, and increasingly in general-circulation newspapers. MTV only added to the information glut.
Country music media, IIRC, were a bit slower to evolve. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Country Music magazine went beyond superficial, and the Music City News never really did become anything more than free publicity for labels and artist management. Country Weekly, launched during the boom of the early '90s, was an embarrassment -- I recall vividly a story about Kenny Chesney accompanied by a photo supposedly showing him sitting down to dinner with family. He was wearing his cowboy hat at the table, almost certainly because Chesney had lost most of his hair and, hatless, would have looked more like George Costanza than the country hunk the mag's female readers were supposed to be swooning over. Still, by the end of the '80s, fans were getting genuine info on their favorites from TNN and other media outlets, so again, radio DJs said less about what they were playing.
