mp3 blogs - golden age?

what about… gabba.net or whatever it was? classic layout! discovered italo disco via “spacer woman” there.

― brimstead

Gabba.cc yeah it was amazing

gabba was good times. Moka had a good one. So did I!

I also posted in gabba from time to time because I was a huge fan of it. Dream Chimney sort of had a similar concept alas not an mp3 blog - but it started as one for some time iirc?

oh yes dream chimney is my shit! great songs of the day and mixes

Slow Goes the Goose, Opium Hum...About ten years I was doing a lot of commuting and train travel for work; I miss the time it gave me to immerse myself in the music on my i-pod: jazz, ECM stuff. Any old albums were instantly discoverable and downloadable it seemed: wonderful music that changed my life and that I would never have found or got into if I had had to go into a shop and buy the CDs.

I remember really early on, some site that was simply just called Mp3.com (or something close) that had live shows from Tortoise and other Chi bands, also for some reason loads of Rob Crow/Thingy/Heavy Veg/Optiginally Yours stuff, I recall waiting all day to download this compilation of Powedresser tracks.

My experience was a lot like Deflatormouse's: finding niche blogs, quickly recognising a kind of trustworthiness in terms of quality and just going for it. I undoubtedly binged and have hard drives full of stuff I'll probably now never listen to, but in terms of opening me up to different sounds, different continents of sound in some instances, it was an amazing, fertile period.

Inconstant Sol was a great one! Still going in some capacity I think?

Awesome Tapes From Africa was absolutely a premier blog, I think the record label that spun off of that is still active. Also Cocaine Blunts, The Beat Electric and American Athlete for disco, Just Press Play and Motel de Moka for indie/global/electronic music.

Also Fluxblog was outstanding, isn’t Matthew Perpetua ILM adjacent?

Willard's Wormholes

Mp3.com

Might not be the site you're thinking of from the description, but mp3.com was definitely a thing, and I loved it. Not a blog, though. I have said before that one of the reasons I'm such a bandcamp stan is that it reminds me of the old mp3.com days. God, I'm old.

I'm sure I found a blog about the history of queer music and early queer records one time that was really comprehensive. Fucked if I can remember what it was called, though.

A couple of Brazilian ones:
http://vinil-velho.blogspot.com/
http://www.toque-musicall.com/

At the time I had a job where I could listen to music in headphones all day, which I did every single day. It was probably overkill.

It didn't really feel exploitative. I was mostly downloading out of print records I'd never heard of- anything with a cool looking cover, or interesting instrumentation. If anything there was a sense of responsibility to preserve all this stuff that might otherwise disappear- to reduplicate, witness and store this material felt like a kind of conservatorship. It still feels important. I mean, I certainly also pirated records that were in print, by living, active artists, records that had recently been reissued... But it's not mainly what I was getting from these blogs.

I think the whole (certainly imperfect) phenomenon fit the window of its time -- mp3.com as emil.y noted was around but wasn't really as consistent a place for selling things, and the Apple Store et al only got around to more individual efforts with time if memory serves. The combination of Bandcamp and Spotify in the 2010s basically created a 'look you can do it this way' approach that allowed for formally licensed and released efforts to be more easily brought back (I say this with no value judgment re Spotify, who I am obviously not fond of; still, it signaled a mechanism wherein somebody theoretically got something, even if pennies, rather than nothing). So the mid- to late 2000s played out as it did -- worth also noting how much contemporary stuff from that decade was shared out via such blogs because of the whole micro-release strategy of a lot of tiny labels, thinking of tape-only labels like Stunnned and the like; I remember the main fellow telling me back around then he didn't mind if stuff was shared out once he'd sold out of a cassette run.

I remember this one, I guess most of the blogs I'm linking are not in English, I think I got a few misuque concrete albums from here, there was a blog I took a ton of oop misuque concrete from that I can't find rn

http://spectres-sonores.blogspot.com/

flux blog is basically the only mp3 blog still going. he even still posts mp3s that you can download, like 3-4 a week

the difference is that artists/labels used to use blogs to distribute remixes to get traction etc.
but then once bandcamp kicked in, bands/labels realised that they could get £££ from the remixes of one off tracks via their own channel.

Awesome Tapes From Africa was absolutely a premier blog, I think the record label that spun off of that is still active. Also Cocaine Blunts, The Beat Electric and American Athlete for disco, Just Press Play and Motel de Moka for indie/global/electronic music.

Also Fluxblog was outstanding, isn’t Matthew Perpetua ILM adjacent?

― recovering internet addict/shitposter (viborg)

Thanks Forks and viborg! I have very fond memories of that time. Motel de Moka did eventually become a global project! We had people from Europe, Australia, Asia, Africa and America sharing music in there.

https://experimentaletc.blogspot.com/

this was a big one for me discovering EAI, kraut, avant etc as a proper young teen. i miss real internet community so much.

robotsinheat (run by an ILXor, tho I don't remember who, sorry!) was a total fave, introduced me to so much stuff I'd never have given a chance otherwise

also remember loving Beat Electric when I got into a boogie phase

i used to have a huge list of vintage soul/funk/r&b blogs. the king was http://www.soul-sides.com run by Oliver Wang, which appears to still be active!

Two old faves that stopped posting in 2012 but the posts remain even if the uploads are all dead:

http://eggcityradio.com/ soundtracks, library music, comedy, assorted weirdness
http://cosmichearse.blogspot.com/ metal and heavy obscurities posted by the drummer from Agalloch and Ludicra

Ah soul sides is a great one, have discovered some absolute gems on that one.

xp Yeah, I have several burned CDs worth of stuff from soul-sides; some tracks are not available on Spotify and some not even on Youtube.

it feels like there are so many fewer spaces for editorializing around music than there were in the days of mp3 blogs. maybe i'm just not looking in the right places?

p.s. thanks for the links upthread i.e. Soul Sides - maybe there's still tons there, just harder to find maybe

Wang does the Heat Rocks podcast with Morgan Rhodes which is really good too

Yeah Oliver's good people, known him for a while now. Absolutely killer live DJ too.

o dubs is the best

Yes and Heat Rocks is a lot of fun.

Another one I just remembered is waxidermy.com

robotsinheat was Jaxon iirc!

Moka - that’s so cool! I had no idea, thanks for all the good tunes!

Another co-sign for Soul Sides too, I’ll have to check out Heat Rocks.

surprised nobody has mentioned Prog Not Frog

Blogs whose names are lost in the murk is pretty much where I'm at with most of them that I used to visit, though. For some reason ProgNotFrog sticks out in my memory, though I doubt I spent all that much time there.

― emil.y, Saturday, October 16, 2021 3:11 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Great blog, it bears repeating!

ah, sorry, missed that.

A bit of a long shot here, but does anyone know of any of these blogs that specializes, or even just occasionally posts out-of-print Rhino comps and things like that?

Some circuitous route led me back to the excellent Blogariddims series that came out in what I reckon was the late 00s. The ones I remember were Woebot's jazz one (gateway to Gil Evans iirc) and the Grievous Angel one. The blog posts have vanished from what I can make out, but the mixes are preserved on Mixcloud.

https://www.mixcloud.com/blogariddims/

I can't find it now, but one that I liked for weird/psychedelic folk was called I think Babelblogue or something like that.

I know of a couple blogs like this that are still going.

https://www.fondsound.com/ is great for 90's new age / jazz / pop stuff from Asia.

https://www.listentothis.info/ is really in that classic music blog mode where you're getting one person's favorite obscure records along whatever genres they happen to like. Not as active these days but I think most of the links still work.

ZippyShare went down in the last couple of weeks :(

tbh I'm pleased about that because you had to use a VPN to access it and it was annoying

what about… gabba.net or whatever it was? classic layout! discovered italo disco via “spacer woman” there.

Was originally gabba.amp I think? (By name if not by domain)

How I discovered my favorite Ghostface track (Gorilla Hood)

and I Luv U ofc