Brief thoughts on O.G. Said the Gramophone's Twitter state of the blogosphere

1) The state of the blogosphere-as-filter is embarrassing. It has become an infinite number of blogs “written” by an infinite number of monkeys receiving an infinite number of PR e-mails. The hunt for the next big thing has become a daily harvest of hundreds of next embarrassingly small things. In earlier days, music bloggers might’ve harbored the desire to go on to become a professional music journalist or critic and attempted to write well. With those professions (read: my profession!) in deep shit, that seems to no longer be the case. As Reynolds says, “drifting, not sifting.” You don’t have to write a lot to provide something valuable: look at Gorilla Vs. Bear, who posts music that makes sense within the broader framework of his taste rather than because he got offered an “exclusive.” (Which is not to say nobody should post exclusives. I’m happy to get them. That’s not really the point.)

2) New music does not have any more inherent value than old music. Given the state of things, it probably has less. New music gets the advantage here because it a) Allows bloggers to ride trends and appear plugged-in and cool b) can be seen live, allowing you to have meaningful concert experiences #carles and, crucially, c) is made legal to post by bands and labels.

The best thing indie labels could possibly do would be to release a free MP3 per album for all of their catalog releases and send out a gigantic mail blast encouraging bloggers to start searching through the archives.

3) The current world of Internet music obsession, it bears mentioning, is still a very small corner of the Internet divided into many, many more microscope corners, no matter how many people voted on the Pazz and Jop poll this year. (Not a lot, really.) We can obsess all we want, but ultimately, today’s buzz band is tomorrow’s January archive post that gets two hits a year. Good luck selling records. Which is to say: don’t take this stuff too seriously, STG.

As always, these ideas are not binaries and there are plenty of good blogs and average blogs and bad blogs, just like everything else.

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   about it!” - DAVE RAWK FINDS INFINITY EMBARRASSING

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    Gramophone’s Twitter

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