How To Kill MP3 Blogs

"Turns out he got a lapdance to that song. That's hot shit. Hope this gives you a boner, too."

I only visit a handful of mp3 blogs. Not that I'm above becoming a junkie, but because I really enjoy finding out about things all on my own. Also, the number that were created within the last year just makes following them all daily an exhaustive task. But I do want to pick one nit in particular: Scenestars. They've been guilty of this sort of self-important carelessness in the past, but today they're hosting three (!) fucking tracks from the New Order album which isn't even due in stores for two more months. It's bad enough when three separate mp3 blogs will post different tracks from any given record, but to have them all in one place is just a gross mishandling of the responsibilities that come with running such a portal. (So is exploiting the good nature of your readers in an effort to stock up on free iPods and other tech trinkets, but I'll save that gripe for another day.) So, fuck Scenestars and any other mp3 blog that carries on in this manner. It's about giving people a taste of what's coming, not about supplying them with a full quarter of the material from a highly anticipated record.

The comments on both posts are especially hilarious, if only because it's just as illegal to host one track as it is two, or even three.

Journal has been deleted. If you are audiogasms, you have a period of 30 days to decide to undelete your journal.

Wow, you really did kill it.

Probably not so smart.

Ironic bandmembers FTW

Government Names is still at http://governmentnames.blogspot.com/

Gov't Names still here! although DK doesn't really write anymore and I only write about Bmore music there now and kind of deliberately took myself out of the "rap blog" game. Ethan is constantly telling me that G&W is gonna have new shit soon, I hope that's true.

Well, that and to me it seems easier to contact blog-owners direct, rather than figuring out their webhost's contact email address. But like you imply, that tactic is rather less strongarmed and might engender a shrug from sketchier sites.

I do think it's dumb that we might have to consider getting some weird, copyright-blind Scandinavian host, or something -- not because i have any desire to keep something online when an artist objects to it, but just to protect our asses from losing a year's worth of hosting payments because a label goes over our head to the source.

Again and finally, I appreciate that I wouldn't have these headaches if I wasn't doing something illegal!

John - thanks. Abby-poptext got a rather scarier email, really, in terms of its implications for the rest of us... Someone came knocking, insisting that she buy a blanket licence... (I don't want to say more without checking with her!)

It adds a new angle to the mp3-blogger risk, since even if I pay a blanket license per quarter to them for the right to host full-length streams of their artists (who are pretty much every major label-signed act), the legality is still contingent on permission from those who own recordings, ie the labels. So, back at square one.

So, a new challenge. Even if the labels turn a blind eye, these guys aren't.

it does make me wonder if we need to start (siiiigh) talking about some regional mp3blog networks, to share the financial burden of licenses and get a better negotiating position.

unfortunately, as soon as we start talking about money, it means that mp3blogs will start to require revenue. and that means that either subscription fees or advertising. the former isn't very likely and the latter is something i personally dislike very much. and this of course will be a huge obstacle for all the cool little mp3blogs that we all imagine appearing. ("MOOMINRAP: the finnish hip-hop blog")

Jed, I think the point is that ultimately, the ones that are doing the real damage will thrive and prosper. Why doesn't everyone start up an MP3 blog? Work, effort, hosting, writing ability in some cases (hey, never stopped me when I started). Where people hide behind anonymity, there's less risk, less incentive to put passion into the writing and promotion, and therefore less benefit to the artists. (Okay, assuming there IS benefit to the artists. I like to think there is..). Whereas people with a strong brand identity to their writing who put a lot into it... are vulnerable, but also have more potential to do good, and the MP3 blogosphere will lose those guys first.

Oh, I am? Oh, hum.

But hey, feel fre to drop by with a misguided, mean-spirited, self-congratulatory "I told you so" any ol' time, pal! We'll drink peppermint schnapps and wax nostalgiac about other times you annoyed me.

That's not to say that MP3 blogging can't be a great, useful thing. The level of dishonesty about the whole enterprise, both from its attackers and its defenders, is terrible.

there is SO much projection going on here. i don't see anyone saying they are "owed" the courtesy, that they are "entitled" to anything. i don't see the "oh my god!" that you're citing, Mickey.

any "surprise" you are seeing is more akin to "huh. i was just fined for jaywalking" (to which the appropriate response is obv "YOU DESERVE IT YOU LAWLESS MOTHERFUCKER, JAYWALKING IS BREAKING THE LAW") than "WTF? jaywalking? how dare the police fine me! i thought they understood that jaywalking was cool, man."

and the utter disingenuousness of it all..

UPDATE: edit: The text and file orginally posted here has been removed from TPP and is no longer shared with a publicly available/viewed website. See the second sentence of UPDATE II and the entirety of UPDATE III. We encourage you to go to the black market or to the private areas of this site or others like it. It's everywhere now. We appreciate all the links and respect we got from the bigger sites (who easily could've never acknowledged or credited us) listed below.

UPDATE II: Big ups and much love/respect to Stereogum, Fluxblog, Tonight Let's Dance and the Boston Phoenix's On The Download. That CnD letter/email/notice should be showing up any second now...

UPDATE III: 8hrs, 30mins. One. Hot. Track.

RIP

Matt, stop stealing my ideaslunch!
-- David R. (popshots75`), Tuesday, 19 October 2004 12:53 (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

Fixed.

Great blog.

lol at Derek Borchadt. In general.

"MOOMINRAP: the finnish hip-hop blog"

why does this not exist

Derek Borchardt, Harry Redknapp's spiritual forebear

Which chairman's wife's face did Arry threaten to piss on? I forget

i want to know what that hot-shit 8:30 track was

retro, you know

"MOOMINRAP: the finnish hip-hop blog"

why does this not exist

-- Tracer Hand, Wednesday, December 12, 2007 7:35 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

it does, but it's called Discobelle (Finnish, Swedish, whatever).

^^^ Racist

so google has started pulling these from blogspot, according to pitchfork. not surprising to me, although it sucks for blogs that just put up one or two songs. I'm not going to bemoan the blogs that offered links to mediafire .rars of entire albums since I'm sure those will just pop up again somewhere else.

so how did they choose which blogs to shut down? is it just an across the board sweep?

That explains why My Jazz World disappeared last night.

so how did they choose which blogs to shut down? is it just an across the board sweep?

I imagine they had some kind of automated thing that scanner their cloud for links to mp3s and archive formats.

They have an automated anti-spam scanner that rakes over their territory, labels blogs spammers and locks out their users for 20 days before deleting them.

I know the latter because they had a false positive mass incident last year and my blog was one of those which was in the sweep. It was corrected fairly rapidly.

However, there's no real appeal process for anything at Google Blogger. Once the hive mind is made up, there's nothing but to lump it.

They recently announced they were terminating their FTP-publishing application to private domains not in their cloud. It's raised a stink but there's no recourse but to either migrate your blog back to Google servers or go elsewhere. Mine was caught up in this and I've already started migrating readers to WordPress.

So if something gets slated for disappearing en masse because of an upper level decision, that's it.

i have one of those blogs on blogger and have long suspected the axe was coming down, so i had it email me an xml backup nightly. which i could just put up somewhere else or host myself if i felt like it.

“The people that create and write and update these sites with fervent passion are your biggest customers! We are the ones that buy the $100 box set of material released 10-years ago. We are the ones that collect the 7”s, attend the music festivals, and buy the t-shirts. We LOVE MUSIC and we LOVE Bands and no matter how you think you’re helping your industry by sending the Web Sheriff or DMCA notices you are most certainly not helping. Thanks to everyone who has supported me, offered a hand, or culled older blogs in the last two days! It’s because of your outpouring of appreciation that I won’t wash my hands of this whole music business, and will continue on reinforced in the thought that I am doing something that people appreciate and that what we as music bloggers do is vital to the continued existence of the music we love.” — Patrick from Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, on Blogger’s shutdown of his blog

Kinda dramarama imo. I mean, I frequent mp3 blogs as much as the next guy, but the righteousness of some of them is weird. You ARE giving away something for free, which can be purchased elsewhere.

tylerw otm, but like My Jazz World only ever put up OOP stuff, so I'm bummed it got shut down.

yeah, totally -- I mean, like I said, I go to these sites too, though i have a weird thing about trying not to illegally download new stuff ... obviously stealing is stealing regardless of the age of the music, but for some reason I feel more OK about downloading an old jazz record as opposed to, i dunno, the new spoon album.

You ARE giving away something for free, which can be purchased elsewhere.

That's the reason they exist -- to provide content where they have none to contribute -- for the sake of an audience. Or if they would choose to do their own content, they'd have to take their chances on the audience being much smaller.

The people that create and write and update these sites with fervent passion are your biggest
customers

This is a bit laughable. Fervent they may really be but it's often in a way in which they're fervently scraping content from others. Which does take some effort and dedication.

*knocks on wood, looks at Dashboard*

so far nothing has changed.

lmao @ first post itt

I hope they shutdown shit like this:

http://vinylkorps.blogspot.com/

shutting down primarily live boot and OOP blogs seems pretty dumb IMO

but seems like about 70 percent of "blogs" aren't really curated anyway, just like filesharing via rapidshare

From Google Blogger's perspective there's no easy way to manage a culling between differences
in what's being pirated, whether it's out of print, live recordings or current. If it's an automated business, which it almost has to be these days, it's entirely dependent on the sensitivity of the programming dictated by a collection of gross measures or rules imposed on page scrapes.

Or maybe they're relying on automation to assemble a list and using eyeballs to make decisions on a top tier of offenders, or some combination of the two.

BUT THEY PROMISED THEY WEREN'T EVIL!!!

i just hope blogs like worldservice (congo music from 50s-70s, almost all out of print) don't get swept up along with all the endless blogs posting leaks of new merge albums.

honestly, i love ian zamboni's blog but he's asking for it, by posting shit like a bunch of love albums that rhino still has in print.

dudes like that SHOULD get shut down imo

the ethics of all this are extremely complex, i think, and usually not handled very well in discussions like this one. is there an article that tackles all this from an ethical--not just a pratical/legal--standpoint.

?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/google-deletes-music-blogs

yeah I'm another not-d/l'ing-if-it's-new-'cause-that's-uncool guy but OOP stuff, I really feel like there's such a compelling case to be made that "sharity" (ugh) bloggers are doing a real service to history. (this despite my weird blanchot schtick about how I think it's kinda awesome when history devours stuff and leaves no traces, etc., about which the less said the better no doubt)

service to history is no small thing imo! like, in metal, during the explosion of new bands in the early eighties, there were TONS of things that got either self-released or came out on little tiny labels and then went through lesser chains of distribution, and probably half the copies got pulped and the rest are God knows where, and it's a valuable service with no downside if that stuff is made freely available. it provides a clearer picture of something. it doesn't take anyone's business away. of course, then somebody does something awesome like the Texas Metal Archives CD and that too goes straight into the "here, take somebody's work for free" bin, so it gets hard to sort out how to deal with things, short of some Official Office Of Blog Allowability which isn't going to happen until I am Tsar.

I feel like a reexamination of public domain w/r/t music is maybe in order but I'm not holding my breath for that

fuck any dude who pirates a dreamboat gorilla album. stealing from angels imo

http://www.blackbeardlives.com/day2/images/films.jpg

"ARR! YE'VE UPLOADED THE WRONG TRACK! OURRRR LEAD SINGLE WAS TRACK #5, Y'SCURRV!"

IMO spreading the word about DBG is doing god's work; Doug Boatgorilla might think differently.

yeah, i mean, for instance, Mutant Sounds is seriously a service to humanity, like an intensely great world of music that is pretty much literally not available anywhere else. In some ways I give blogs that actually feel curated a pass too. Like Locust St., which will share officially available stuff sometimes (though it's old stuff), but puts it in a context that doesn't exist anywhere else ...

We'd like to inform you that we've received another complaint regarding your blog," begins the cheerful letter received by each of the owners of Pop Tarts, Masala, I Rock Cleveland, To Die By Your Side, It's a Rap and Living Ears. All of these are music-blogs – sites that write about music and post MP3s of what they are discussing. "Upon review of your account, we've noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger's Terms of Service ... [and] we've been forced to remove your blog. Thank you for your understanding."

Here are a couple grafs that show some of the problems and vagaries of the situation. If you do a Blogger-hosted blog you know there's a fink switch for someone to flag you, for any reason, at the top of it.

It's easy to abuse and misuse and I'm sure Blogger gets a steady and large stream of material from it.

If it decides to act on a class of it without exposing each blog to eyeballing, that lessens a huge amount of work.

When I moved my blog to my domain I removed the fink switch because of its potential for misuse. Many people do the same. And there's a way to have it wiped off if you host in the cloud.

Despite the de facto alliance between labels and blogs, not all of the record companies' legal teams have received the message. In a complaint posted to Google Support, Bill Lipold, the owner of I Rock Cleveland, cited four cases in the past year when he had received copyright violation notices for songs he was legally entitled to post. Tracks by Jay Reatard, Nadja, BLK JKS and Spindrift all attracted complaints under the USA's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, even when the respective MP3s were official promo tracks. As a publicist for BLK JKS' label, Secretly Canadian, told Lipold: "Apparently DMCA operate on their own set of odd rules, as they even requested that the BLK JKS' official blog remove the song." It's not clear who "DMCA" is in this case, as the act does not defend itself.

"I assure you that everything I've posted for, let's say, the past two years, has either been provided by a promotional company, came directly from the record label, or came directly from the artist," Lipold wrote to Google.
The company's first official response came only late yesterday, as #Musicblogocide2k10 sped up Twitter's trending charts. "When we receive multiple DMCA complaints about the same blog, and have no indication that the offending content is being used in an authorised manner, we will remove the blog," explained product manager Rick Klau. "[If] this is the result of miscommunication by staff at the record label, or confusion over which MP3s are 'official' ... it is imperative that you file a DMCA counter-claim so we know you have the right to the music in question."

The only way to get Google Blogger's attention is to post in support. There really is no way to contact them directly and that's purposeful. There's a thing called a 'trouble ticket' which you can lodge but it's buried and it's one of those common e-mail forms that people instinctively know are installed only for cosmetic purpose.

Blogger's way of handling trouble is to ignore it until it reaches a certain level of noise on the support forum. There's obviously no transparency and it has always been this way.

The press, in this case, has forced a response from Rick Klau. It was that way when Blogger's FTP publishing started failing. It was largely ignored by Blogger until it had reached a high level of noise and a couple of stories were written about it.

At that point Klau issued a statement and the service improved, but only for awhile. What really was happening is that Blogger was probably undergoing an internal debate on how to end FTP-publishing once and for all. And that entailed coming up with a method which it could push at users to give them a chance to move back to the cloud and a deadline to do it.

So in the Guardian story, it looks like a pretty standard Blogger procedure. They've pushed a method at users who think they've been wronged and maimed by a process they're putting in place. The Guardian notes that most users don't know how to do this or it's obfuscated by Blogger. This is all true. But that has always been the level of support furnished. It's not a design flaw, it's a feature.

Sometimes Blogger appears to harden or accelerate its plans when the press notices and some row erupts, perhaps to get it behind them faster. They may put up a 'support' blog to deal with the subject but that usually means there will be a product manager hanging around just to further explain why they're doing what they're doing in terms of blogs either being a drain on resources -- in the case of FTP publishing -- or perhaps in this case -- how they came to the decision to clean house on terms of service copyright violators because of legal exposure or a drain on resources caused by people always lodging complaints through the fink switch or other means.

teal dear

am0n otm

Looks like Google's caving:

@masalacism -- Incredible! @Google apologized and put www.masalacism.blogspot.com back on! thanks to @rklau #musicblogocide2k10

Check this post for details (update #2)

http://buzz.blogger.com/2010/02/quick-note-about-music-blog-removals.html

Amazin'! And they were using automation with a bug in it!

http://vimeo.com/9351344

if you have a blog hosted on somebody else's domain i don't see how you should feel entitled to any control over anything, frankly. download wordpress and set up your own site already.