Five years ago, in August 2004, The Morning News asked six music bloggers to talk about “the newest frontier in online music sharing”:
Roundtable: MP3 Bloggers, August 2004
With the help of Mike Smith, The Morning News revisited this topic earlier this year to have a second such roundtable on the topic.
Music Bloggers Roundtable Redux, July 2009
More on this later, but these two sets of interviews offer a unique perspective into where music blogs were and where they’ve arrived today, without marketing speak or hidden agendas.
Anthony Volodkin
Taylor McKnight
Zoya Feldman
Scott Kidder
Arkadiy Kukarkin
What a joke. These blogs might not have a hidden agenda, but blogs like My name is not Pelski who sell merch for peoples songs do. I think mp3 blogs are going down a dark path at the moment where they will not engage with indie artists (such as myself, I am bias but i have never ever heard back from a blog no matter how personalized and sincere an email has been following all the blogs protocols) but they will happily post unfinished demos and set rips galore from commercial artists who clearly do not want that kind of promotion (no wonder the mediafire links go down so quickly). Its these more popular blogs that I think are just as bad as the labels, if not worse. Maybe im way off, keen to hear what people think about this.
September 19, 2009 @ 10:05 pm
Whoops, forgot to say. I agree with the article thats just my feeling after reading it and thinking about the big picture. I agree its all about whos got exclusive radio rips first and then a billion other blogs just regurgitate that.
September 19, 2009 @ 10:08 pm
And that the bloggers in the article know exactly whats happening!
September 19, 2009 @ 11:55 pm
Luke, there are obviously all kinds of blogs out there. I believe you that some blogs do what you described. It does not follow from that though, that all music blogs act this way.
The bloggers in these sets of interviews have defined this medium early on and have thought about it more than most people, this is why it’s interesting to hear their perspective on this.
September 20, 2009 @ 3:52 pm
“i have never ever heard back from a blog no matter how personalized and sincere an email has been following all the blogs protocols”
I feel you, Luke. The thing is that, as a blogger of a medium-sized blog myself, we receive so many emails per day (at least 20 +), that, as much as we’d like to, we simply don’t have time to read everything, let alone LISTEN to everything. When we started our blog we put a note on our homepage that read something like “If you create music you think we might like, and would like us to have a listen, send an mp3 to …”
Perhaps naively, we expected to get mainly personal messages from smaller bands, perhaps with a link or a song or two attached. We also hoped to get RELEVANT stuff, i.e. bands with some form of affinity with the stuff we actually post.
What’s happened however is that now we seem to be on just about everyone’s mailing list. These mailing lists are just run by labels, usually by the designated ‘blog person’, whose job it is to basically spam us half to death.
So yeah, small bands of the world, my advice would be: Keep writing us, but just make it very clear that your message is personal, and hasn’t been mailed to the entire HM blog list. It also might be helpful to include some influences, bands you sound like, “if you like ‘…..’ you might like us” etc in the actual SUBJECT line. Also, we tend to not bother going to links sent in, so please just attach your favourite song, or one that you feel best represents your band, as an mp3 to the email. It’ll have a much greater chance of being listened to like that!
September 23, 2009 @ 3:09 am
Luke, you might also consider the genre you’re in. As a blogger myself, I can vouch for the fact that we are absolutely inundated with emails from DJs offering up mixes. Most are what I’d call bedroom DJs, and there’s such a glut of that kind of stuff that it gets really, really difficult to sift through it and find someone who is actually doing something interesting. I’d say 90% of the DJ mixes I receive via email contain more or less the same combination of songs, simply in a different order.
Add to that the fact that I’m in a similar boat as Steven, and receive something on the order of 150-250 emails PER DAY in a typical week. They’re from PR companies, labels, artists, etc. It is impossible to listen and reply to every email. And the reality is, I tend to read emails from trusted/proven sources first, which means if I’ve never heard from you before you tend to get shuffled to the bottom. Not the fairest situation, admittedly, but the only way I can personally manage it.
I’d offer similar advice in that you just have to be patient, and keep at it. Endurance will pay off and eventually one of us will open up your email, listen and think to ourselves “Jeez, why haven’t I heard this guy before?”.
September 23, 2009 @ 10:24 pm
It was fascinating to read both roundtables. The main differences between the two, apart from an understandable dimming of initial enthusiasm, seems to be the emphasis on free culture. I found that exploring free & legal Creative Commons-licensed albums rejuvenated my love of music. As Jonathon Coulter has found, it is possible to straddle the gap between corporate/commercial music and pirated material by exploiting the opportunities presented by technological developments. Apart from anything else, CC music is innocent fun.
September 27, 2009 @ 6:07 am
I was just reading through these comments and feel I must make a complaint to the way Hype Machine is run.
I run a blog that was turned down from hype machine on a couple of occasions. That’s fine. However, when I read some of the blogs that are on here I see a heap of sub-standard, below par blogs who seem to flout rules and take the piss out of guys like Luke (above).
We are medium sized, and like Steven we receive about 20 emails per day. However we ALWAYS email back people (excluding pr companies and mailing list/eflyers) to say thank you for getting in touch with us. I never promise that we can post everything but just out of respect we try to make friends and are always complimentary to everyone. Aside from the fact that they could be the next big thing, they’re going to the trouble of sending their music out for free - something that should be recognized with at least a thanks.
More so - any tune we post we ALWAYS tell the artist and ask them if it’s ok. Our house style states that we also provide 3 links (minimum) to the artist, one of those being a retail link.
Now, how many blogs on hypem can claim to do the same? I hate to moan but the reason we were given for being turned away were utter bullshit. It sounded like the person who looked into it couldn’t be arsed and TOTALLY contradicted themselves when given reasons for not accepting.
So I just want to say this: I’m not contacting you to beg you to re-consider. I’m contacting you to in an attempt for you guys to stop being so hypocritical. If you’re gonna turn blogs down, make sure that the blogs you have on your list are at least of the standard of the ones that you turn away. It’s ridiculous reading through these awful, disrespectful blogs that give 8 tunes away in one post and/or write a single sentence saying ‘i need a dump’, knowing that WE are a quality publication with proper rules and regs that our writers have to abide to.
Sort it out hype machine. Also, be a bit more respectful to people on their way up. You never know when you may need them on your way down…
October 2, 2009 @ 8:39 am
Way not to link to your blog after writing all that, btw. What is it? :/
Also, if you see blogs on the Hype Machine that you believe are substandard, you should email links to them to us and we can discuss. It’s certainly easier to say that there exist some blogs out there that are bad, than to offer something more constructive and specific. We demand the constructive feedback.
Finally, while we do have some guidelines, there is ultimately editorial discretion over which blogs are included. Over the four years of doing this, we noticed many people hate being told “no”, which makes all this notably more perilous.
Emailing you now.
October 2, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
i just had a friend interview me as a amateur music blogger about the exact same topic.
those last few one liner questions at the end of the 2009 article sparked a few “awww yeh” moments for me.
like Sean Michaels would like to see more bloggers “Writing more about less.”
and interestingly, the question about the aggregators, Andrew Noz said “I would like them to end.”.
i really would like to see the result of there being no hype machine or elbows. would bloggers’ posts change and how so? would bloggers have to really hunt for new music instead of trolling other blogs for already discovered artists? would they read that one email from the little guy trying to make a break and discover an absolute gem?
one can only ask.
and to “doesn’t matter” above…well said good sir
October 3, 2009 @ 5:33 am
I agree, it’d be cool to see what it’d look like. But I can’t imagine that it’d stay this way for long.
The desire to track and dive into all this music writing and media is so strong, someone would build an aggregator shortly after the Hype Machine/Elbo.ws were to disappear.
We’d all be back at square one given that the new operators would be lacking the understanding of all the nuances involved in this community, making all the same mistakes we’ve made years ago, all over again.
October 3, 2009 @ 12:46 pm
Hmm… some of the things that the long-time bloggers are complaining about (too much press release cut-and-paste, etc.) might be true of the blogs they read (or skim), but it’s not true of *all* music blogs, not by a long shot.
There’s also a fair bit of non-English-language content out there as well, but… you have to look for it.
I’m grateful for aggregators like this site, although I question the necessity for numerical rankings, and I also do see that some bloggers are recycling the same new pop releases over and over. But - since my blog has a very different focus - I’m ultimately not that interested in what the “copycat” bloggers are doing. I’d rather investigate blogs that are doing something different, dealing with (for example) African music, or Mexican pop, or… there’s a lot of variety out there, really.
Perhaps the choice of panelists was less than ideal? (If only because it encompassed established bloggers.)
My .02-worth….
October 5, 2009 @ 3:41 pm
Hi, i have tweet on twitter a few urls to songs of pigor 24 hour ago. But today Pigor isnt found in the search.
When the database will be updated?
Thanks
October 11, 2009 @ 12:08 pm
hey anthony.
I have some real sadness that the vast majority of people putting together mp3blogs (and again, really hate that term) have resorted to full album downloads sans commentary or c+p press releases. I had a utopian vision of people all around the world sharing their thoughts and personal loves in a central basin where everybody could dip in and get a drank. Didn’t turn out that way, no no.
I regret that the second roundtable only went round once, so i feel that there’s a lot we didn’t have a chance to fully discuss. Ol’skool’ bloggers may appear cranky and jaded (and some of us are) but the point is less that newjacks aren’t bringing any quality and more that I’m simply inundated with options to listen to new music, period. Six or seven years ago in pre-YouTube/Facebook/Myspace land, blogs sharing music was the ONLY way, save for P2P, to hear new songs. They’re just a less vital part of the workforce these days and it’s not even their fault. The industry caught up to what we were doing and they’re streaming just about everything. Spotify is on the way at the end of the year. We won! But what did we win?
October 14, 2009 @ 11:37 am
john, I think that’s fair, but also that you might be discounting what bloggers can bring to the table - taste, knowledge, entertaining writing, a good ear, etc.
Those things are always in fairly short supply, imo.
October 16, 2009 @ 10:27 pm
This is a great discussion for bloggers and amateur artsits to have as people who have a deep knowledge and passion for music, but the average person browsing the internet loves sites that show them the biggest bangin hits, the ‘need to know’, and a way to download that tune. Realistically that’s gonna be the biggest market of readers and so how is it any surprise that that a large amount of blogs are catering to that. It’s great and necessary for there to be a large amount of blogs out there exposing the unexpose and showcasing new talents, but the sad truth is that most people, except for a relatively small community, won’t care, at least for a while, about those bands. Most bands that people have never heard of before really won’t ever be things that most people will listen to, so this “blog utopia filled with thought and discussion” could possibly exist but it will always be overshadowed by more read aggregates of more popular music. People just always want their less heard of music to jump into that scene and are upset when it isn’t immediately accepted.
December 10, 2009 @ 5:57 pm