Audioblogging OK (with Perpetua shout out!): Globe & Mail

Music industry makes nice with growing army of audio bloggers
By Robert Everett-Green
The Globe and Mail
TORONTO (CP) — A week or so before the Detroit rock duo the White Stripes released their much-awaited recent CD, a few fans in Memphis, Tenn., began streaming the entire album over the Internet. A leak like that would usually draw a menacing letter from somebody’s lawyer, but when V2 Records heard about it, the New York label’s online marketing guy sent the perpetrators a friendly e-mail asking them to hold off for another week.
The fans immediately withdrew the album from their website, Scenestars.net, and posted a note thanking “the extremely generous people at V2 Records” for being so decent about an honest mistake. Also for giving Scenestars permission to resume free, on-demand plays of the Stripes’ Get Behind Me Satan one day before the disc’s official release on June 7.
Welcome to the world of MP3 blogs, the soft beachhead of the recording industry’s efforts to get more gain and less pain from online music sharing. The same companies that are trying to crush illegal downloading are making nice with a growing army of audio bloggers who offer free access to copyrighted music every day.
The different treatment stems mainly from the attitudes of those on the receiving end. People who go to file-swapping sites such as Grokster want stuff for free. People who maintain music blogs for little glory and no pay want to share their feelings about music, and use MP3 files to make the exchange more vivid. Reading a blog entry about a song by Spoon while hearing the music on your computer speakers is like listening to a friend’s excited analysis of the sounds pouring from his dorm-room stereo.
“You’re getting honest feedback from real people who are passionate about it, and who are out there buying records and talking to their friends,” said Miguel Banuelos, V2’s manager of online marketing and promotion, who maintains regular contact with more than two dozen prominent blogs, including Scenestar. “For the most part they’re niche or genre-oriented, which is helpful.”
They also tend to be stout defenders of the property rights of musicians and their labels. “Files are only up for a very limited time and are here for the express purpose of getting you to go out and buy more CDs,” says a notice at the No. 1 Songs in Heaven, a blog devoted to vintage soul and funk. Invective against greedy music conglomerates is rare, in part because bloggers know that their music posts depend on corporate goodwill, especially if they want to be first with a hot new track. Besides, the companies know where they live. A blog tended by the same people every day has none of the anonymity of a drive-by download from Kazaa.
Over the past year, the passion of the blogs has become an almost bankable commodity. Several indie rock bands, including the Killers, Franz Ferdinand and Montreal’s Arcade Fire have enjoyed major boosts in sales and visibility as a result of organized music chatter on the web. The e-zine Pitchfork is still the best-known source for online opinion, but the balance of influence may be shifting.
Ryan Schreiber, who founded Pitchfork at his parents’ house 10 years ago, recently told the Chicago Tribune: “If I were starting over, I’d certainly start a blog instead of a webzine.”
Music webzines are mostly modelled on paper magazines, and run album reviews that aren’t much different from those found in Exclaim, the free monthly Canadian music mag. Audio blogs are more like really slow radio stations, for music you won’t hear on radio. They treat the song as the medium of exchange, and the paragraph as the unit of comment.
An audio blog “allows for a different kind of music writing, because you can engage with the song on a moment-by-moment basis,” said Jordan Himelfarb, a McGill philosophy student and musician who writes for Said the Gramophone. “Without the audience being able to listen while they read, it would be too obscure.”
Many sites, however, are bigger on enthusiasm than sustained analysis. Some, such as Fifteen Minutes to Listen, give only brief descriptive information about the tracks they offer. “You’ve got to hear this!” is the prevailing ethos. At the other extreme (short of words-only music blogs such as Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise or Carl Wilson’s Zoilus) is Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua, whose critical commentary has professional depth and polish.
A “discernible number” of audio blogs are run by people who have some professional relationship to music and the music industry, said V2’s Banuelos. Many are venting their desire to get ahead of the curve and to have their say about the state of the art, which they may not get in the corporate environment or while spinning decks at a nightclub.
All are putting many hours into the task, to the point at which the apparent freedom of the blog can become a form of bondage. Regular publication is an article of faith.
“One of the worst things I ever did was to get into the habit of publishing daily,” said web engineer Frank Yang, who writes Chromewaves, a text-heavy Toronto blog that features one MP3 per week. “I’ve got this Cal Ripken streak going on, where I haven’t missed a day in 16 months.”
(Globe and Mail)