Now this is a good one (MP3 blog/aggregator thing)

from what i can tell, the main frustration with mp3 blogs in this day and age is the weird, Hype Machine-fueled, relentless need for the NEW BIG THING -- and I usually end up staying away from those blogs. imo, the best ones -- like Soul Sides for example -- are the ones that take the simple approach of someone sharing choice cuts from their record collection with you. "Here's the stuff I love, and here's why." I love that these kinds of blogs exist and they make the Internet a better place.

btw I know the guy who runs hype machine; he really loves music! If you have beef with the culture, the guy who built the meeting hall is not the one to take issue with.
it occurs to me that I'm in a shitty position to pass judgment as I'm not really participating these days. Hopefully the shame of that thought will motivate to BLOG AGAIN OH RAPTURE
i kinda dig the nomenclature mpfree blog, that's cute.

i thought sock was an ILX only term! I should get out more often.

i don't doubt that ALL of these mp3 blog people are music lovers -- i mean, they spend a lot of time dealing with music ... it's just that the reason i kinda burned out on a lot of mp3 blogs was that there seemed to be a need to keep finding the new band and then, more often than not, to hype that new band to the high heavens. and, more often than not, the band wouldn't be that good.

http://fleamarketfunk.com/

By ageist I didn't want to imply that you were old but that your blogs were and that you've been in the game longer than mostly anyone.
I do understand the crankiness at some point if the main complaint is about full album blogs or hype & leak blogs. When I started blogging 4 years ago posting full albums or unauthorized leaks was the unwritten rule that mostly everyone in the mp3 blog community respected and mostly everyone who did share full albums were sharing music which was really odd and hard to find. The honeymoon had to end someday, sure, but that's not a reason to be a jerk abd automatically assume that every new mp3 blog is unworthy of attention or to say you simply don't care about other mp3 blogs but yours.

Moka I don't think anyone in that article implied that someone newer bringing a high quality mp3 blog to the table would be unwelcome or that they missed the boat on having any cred

just sent out a few emails to ask for my CDs to be taken down/links removed. It's pretty epressing when it's a Sharebee page and it says "this link has been accessed 1,543 times". Do I think that means we would've sold 1,543 more CDs without the posting? No, of course not. But 15 more would've been nice.

― dan selzer, Wednesday, July 29, 2009 2:43 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i've been waiting for someone to start using those DL counts as career statistics like sales figures (probably happened already and i just didn't see it)

big champagne makes a profit doing just that

ah i never had a real concept of what that is

the point, for me at least, saying I don't much read other blogs these days (and admittedly, this wasn't really illuminated; we only did one round in the round table and I would've liked to do at least one more) 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?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare.html
Worth noting that LOTS of people think the BC metrics are utterly full of shit.

yeah i mean -- in 2004 there was no YouTube, there were only a handful of mp3 upload sites -- it was a lot harder to get your hands on media to share so it was more about what you were saying and how you were saying it by default xpost

the only mp3 blog i check on the reg now is www.firstup.se

an appendix to this thread:
music blogs in 2009: does anyone care anymore?

the idea that instant music download make music criticism irrelevant is so wrong. if anything it should make music writing better.

using music reviews as a buyers guide <<<<<<<<< using music reviews as a starting point for discussion

Music reviews still do act as filters too. None of us have time to listen to everything. Shit like Metacritic, Pitchfork's Best New Music section, ILM threads, etc. suggest stuff to us we might like.]

But deej, you're definitely correct in saying that "the idea that instant music download make music criticism irrelevant is so wrong. if anything it should make music writing better."

kshighway, you said exactly what i was going to. i use criticism as filters for the vast amount of shit out there. i won't even bother reading music blogs that don't at least have embedded flash samples, though. i want to be part of the process and be able to make my own judgments while reading.

rockapads, I totally agree that criticism + actual audio is the ideal way to go.

I wasn't sure where else to put this but:
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/catching-up-with-the-mp3-bloggers
ten years. so old.

http://www.bkmag.com/2014/12/01/what-happened-to-all-the-music-blogs
with love from maura. this is kinda what happened to the mp3 blogs: they sold out or bought in or kept ongoing low profiles

Where have all the bloggers gone, forks have pitched them one by one

Fifteen years! explaining to younger people what an mp3 blog is has become much more complicated than i ever imagined but it generally starts with "okay so before youtube got popular"

it's like youtube but if the video description was interesting and made sense

I wonder how long we have until nobody under a certain age even knows what MP3s are