ONWARD!!!
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Holy Crap.

Angryrobot – I feel like you’re missing an underlying truth to all this – WE ARE HIRED BY LABELS. LABELS YOU LIKE. I didn’t invent some eeeeevil promoter job where i sit in a high rise corner office and set out to commodify blogs, (which I enjoy and which i write, enthusiastically and openly and without trying to hide where work and play meet,) turning them from pure, write-out-of-love enterprises into a machine for press releases and shwag.

Yes, there are shitty blogs that write about shitty bands just because they got the CD in the mail. FINE. But I have a problem with the notion that the very NATURE of PR is the underlying problem. (This goes to jason’s comment, too, that “The PR companies hope you’ll spread some positive word of mouth in return for their charity. To me, this is the crux of the problem.”) You want to write about the bands you love. What’s wrong with a promoter sending you a record with the notion that you might love it? Yes, some do a better job then others. Some work on a large scale where they can afford to send out 500 CDs and see who “bites.” The byproduct of that is that they get the lazy people, too. Others (like myself) send out, say, 75 CDs to people we think will genuinely enjoy and yes maybe love what we’re sending. The reason we are hired (and, on a good day, the reason I love my job) is that I am set on a mission to bring band and fan together, and to maybe maybe maybe help a band get one step closer to being full time musicians. and the point is NOT that I’m some exception to the rule or I want to show everyone how credible I am, the point is that the UNDERLYING CONCEPT, for me and for the major-label-sending-out-too-many-copies-of-the-mediocre-band, is the same: bring band and fan together.

If someone’s tactics are shady, or a writer is caught WILLFULLY LYING about liking a band they secretly hate, call them out, loudly if you like. But the underlying concept of promotion is not the problem, and the notion that a writer should be made to feel bad, or hesitate about writing about a band he or she truly likes, just because the CD came in the mail, is (to me) totally contrary to the notion of being a music fan.

Finally, to jason, who said, “How do you discern whether someone is being honest in their praise or is just paying back the free tickets?” READ THE BLOG. I’m sure (and I seem sarcastic but I mean this sincerely) you can tell when you’re reading the words of a fan and when you’re reading lip service. Really.

Obviously blogging isn’t subject to the same strict ethical standards because ultimately the reader gets to decide whether they like an mp3 or not, an interaction they don’t necessarily get to have with a print review, but I think the same basic precepts can still be applied.

it’s not payola to get free cds or entrance to shows or anything of that sort. but it’s not exactly true that it’s impossible for there to be blog payola. it may not be going on now, but i think if somebody actually were being paid real money to blog about certain things that would, in fact, be at least pretty damn analogous to payola. to me, payola = acting like you made a decision about what to blog about based on finding something interesting vs. doing so for totally mercenary reasons.

again, i don’t know of any cases of this happening and i don’t think getting free stuff is even remotely the same thing. and i don’t think there should be some kind of arbitrary “standard” to apply to blogs; having a blog isn’t the same thing as being a journalist, unless maybe somebody chooses to treat it that way for themselves only.

other than that one nitpicky point, you’ve laid out a very logical and persuasive argument.

The music is either good or bad, and either you like it, or you don’t.

As for the “more transparency” issue, that’s asking for an instutional ethics to be put in place for what is essentially a broad, heterogenous network of content producers, without any mention of how such a thing would be implemented. Sure, blogger A could type on his/her laptop “I bought this CD after months of searching at my local record store, which has no visible corporate affiliation”. Would this make a post more “valid”? Wouldn’t someone who’d shill for a label in the first place just lie about it anyway? Journalists, again, are part of an institution, and what comes with that is an assumption that they’ll tell the truth. Whether they do or not is subjective, but it’s assumed that they just will, or get publicly shamed for not.