On Shifting the Focus A Bit
Monday, September 18, 2006
(This is the start of something larger, triggered for this purpose by an article I read the other day. It’s incomplete, but feel free to leave thoughts, etc. in the comments.)
I like Idolator, I really do—it’s an entertaining read, and one that certainly fills a niche I find myself straining more and more to appreciate as I get older: making fun of shit. It actually is quite a talent, one with no shortage of perseverance and ingenuity, no less, to keep freshly ahead of whatever curve there might be, especially when limited to of pop music. But I come here not to praise Idolator, nor to berate it, because I don’t have the time or the mind for either. I would like however, to respond to one small (or not so small) aspect of Idolator’s initial public offering: their deviously-titled “The Idolator Manifesto on America’s Disappointing Music Nerds.” Don’t get me wrong, I feel through and through the breadth of the sarcasm and humorous overstatement, but there are sections from the first paragraph that I’d like to examine, if you’ll indulge me. First, this quote:
The music blogosphere was going to serve as the great equalizer, deflating the MTV-assisted hype machines and giving the asleep-at-the-wheel music mags a run for their ad money.For all the talk about the blogs as an antidote to the increasingly dunderheaded major-labels, their enthusiasm sometimes does more harm than good, and many of their championed bands suffer from the association.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these statements—the most established and prominent way to evaluate music blogs is through their composite effect on the popularity (or lack thereof) of artists, and blogs’ relationships to traditional criticism and promotion. But what I want to talk about is the fact that, while assessing music blog effects is certainly interesting, it ultimately loses meaning apart from the causes.
So, what I’d like to look at is something that never gets examined when music blogs are discussed: the root cause of why they exist, and how that reflects upon the current state of music criticism, fandom and promotion. I think speculating as to the causes, rather than the presumed effects, might shed some new light on what music blogs are actually doing. First and most importantly, music bloggers are music fans, and their online presences are wholly constituted by actions upon those fan impulses. While certain music bloggers enter into the realm of blogging in order to simply “hype” bands, I think bloggers’ internal rationales are much more complicated than that. Music blogging is not only a niche enterprise, it’s a niche blogging enterprise, which means that even the biggest music blog in the world draws a miniscule fraction of of a gossip, political or tech blog’s traffic (Idolator, with its ties to Gawker, excluded), and music bloggers know this. And while there’s a natural desire on the part of bloggers to see a loved artist or band succeed, it’s a small part of the originating impulse, and music bloggers are much more selfish and incestuous (and fannish) than Idolator (and the many others who’ve written about music blogs) allows.
Current music fandom, especially the online variety, is much different now than it’s ever been, and is changing rapidly. Music fans have always been specifically oriented to and created from their relationships to the “apparatus” (to use Lawrence Grossberg’s term)—or the complicated mechanisms that not only get the music to the listener, but work to “code” it as well, through promotion, distribution, etc. Modern music fans, especially those who spend a good deal of time online, are in a unique position, marked by, let’s say, five factors:
1. all the music they like (or might like) is available free and rather easily online
2. that same music can be duplicated endlessly and without dissolution of sound
3. music promotion is ubiquitous and often disguised as entertainment
4. MTV, commercial radio and Rolling Stone have lost all music-related influence
5. both intelligent/progressive and popular criticism is more accessible and important than ever before on the Web.
Music blogs have emerged out of the modern music fan’s desire to participate in this climate, but with complex and interesting motivations. Bloggers have internalized the conflicting messages of online music promotion, criticism and community and formed a wholly unique online fan culture out of their perceptions of it. This is what I find much more interesting that what music blogs are capable of doing—why they’re doing it, and what they’re doing.
A quick primer on the underlying architecture of music blogs, or more specifically, how they’ve evolved. First, music bloggers themselves are an incredibly homogenous bunch (leaving in parentheses the fact that blogs need the Internet for their public venue, eliminating roughly 96% of the world’s population and most of its brown people—many of whom would probably love not only the free time to babble publicly about music they love, but also to know what the hell the Internet is). The vast majority of music bloggers are of the following composition (based on an informal, non-scientific survey, but also on a lot of common sense and observation): 1. White 2. Male 3. College-educated or in college (the number of MA’s and PhD’s is interesting) 4. Computer and web-savvy, 5. Residents of North America or Western Europe, and 6. Really into certain types of music, generally popular (read: not jazz or avant-garde or classical or opera), and enough to write about it on a regular basis. There are plenty of women, non-whites and those without higher education who write music blogs, but they’re definitely in the minority. Second, the interactions between music bloggers, mainly through sidebar links and comments on posts, but also through a message board (which I’ll get to later), is very incestuous—a quality applicable to most any online community. Thus, it’s probably not a surprise that music bloggers are the biggest commenters on other music blogs. It’s something interesting indeed when a comment is disregarded when not hyperlinked to an online personality, as if the lack of virtual presence betrays an evil intent. Comment boards and link lists (sidebars) are the most prominent self-promotional, self-sustaining and provincial aspects of the network of music blogs. And of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this incestuousness. It comes with the online territory, and it’s what separates music blogs from the online critical outlets to which they’re so frequently (and unfairly) compared. The music blogs that strive toward some (unreachable) notion of critical objectivity instead of the much, much more interesting and readable stylistic and curatorial subjectivity are not only rare, but also typically unreadable and poorly written by comparison. The best blogs, as a fellow blogging friend frequently notes, are the ones with writing that comes from fannish compulsion, not necessarily a desire to issue a critical polemic or punch up sales stats.
Of course, out of this impulse frequently comes promotion (buy-links are an unspoken rule), but that’s more attributable to the Web—the most thoroughly commercialized communications medium the world has ever seen. And it’s this neo-liberalistic impulse, where everything becomes a commodity, that carries over to blogs and bloggers. Even the music bloggers who lean more toward the out-and-out shilling for artists are still operating under the guise of personal taste. Of all the bloggers I talk to regularly, none of them will post what they don’t like, and I believe them. And that’s where the issue of taste comes into play, and though I don’t want to go too deeply into it here, musical taste is comprised of myriad factors, most having nothing to do with the content of the music itself. So when a blogger posts about some piece of music, it’s out of an affinity for it on some level that triggers the desire to create a post. Some write lengthy thought pieces, some recycle PR blurbs, but they’re all operating under taste impulses—wildly differing taste impulses, granted, but if all blogs operated the same way, that’d be scary to me. It’d be like…I don’t know…a “code” or something…like a journalistic “code”…or, er…I’ll stop there.
With this in mind, any music blogger with a sane temper and iota of intelligence can’t truthfully say that they’re “doing it for the artists,” or that “it’s all about the music.” There’s solemn altruism on one hand, and then there’s out-and-out self-delusion on the other. And it’s fine, of course, that bloggers, deep down, promote themselves with music rather than promoting the music itself. All manner of rankings and traffic meters are freely accessible, and are commonly cited as metrical indications of blogging “success,” leading to a prestige economy with mp3s as its endlessly reproducible currency. Then there are the ads. Personally, I find them unmentionably tacky on an aesthetic level, but I can also understand them. It is, once again, the Web after all. Music bloggers with ads has led, however, to an interesting rhetorical disconnect used by a surprising number of bloggers when asked to cite their rationales. On elbo.ws/vanilla (an bulletin-board-shaped orgy of music blogger insiderness long overdue for parody), it’s common to see bloggers citing artist well-being as their primary motivation in one thread, then asking how to maximize BlogAds profit in another. These aren’t bad people, per se (and I’m trying my best to avoid dipping into moral relativism here), they’re just playing by one of the unstated “rules” of music blogging. Of course no one is going to cite as his primary motivation a desire to get paid by posting mp3s and drawing traffic toward his ads, because it’s an awful promotional tactic and, honestly, it’s often not true. But I do wish that more bloggers would admit that, deep down, ads or no ads, they’re blogging for themselves, and that it’s okay to admit that.
Music blogs exhibit all of the telltale signs of a sub rosa fan culture, but one that ironically takes place in the widely visible realm of the Web. And it’s weird to think about music blogging in this regard—typically, fan cultures are rather quiet and secretive (excluding the archetype of rabid Beatles/Michael Jackson acolytes), and much of that is because most people don’t care about them. That lack of notice, in turn, defines their parameters to an extent. But on the Internet, all this gets turned on its head. Despite the personalized nature of blogs (no editors, frequent lack of regard for spelling, grammar, etc.), they can, at least theoretically, be read by anyone, anywhere. They can also be appropriated in any way imaginable, including as crappy critical or promotional outlets. Which leads me to two more points about music blogs as a fan culture—two points necessary for something to be regarded as a fan culture—music blogs are first, inherently positive, and second, generally disregarded by their more “mainstream” counterparts. Now, I’m the last person to offer that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to internalize the meaning of anything, but I think some more context regarding music blogs could perhaps (ahem), shift the focus a little bit, from one that approaches blogs as watered-down amateur criticism to one that sees them as a demographically slim group of (largely indie rock) music fans, avidly promoting themselves as much if not more than the music they post.
A group that exemplifies the notion of a fan culture, defined prominently and wonderfully by Henry Jenkins (buy the book here) as those “unimpressed by institutional authority and expertise, (and who) assert their right to form interpretations and form cultural canons.” Then, he continues, “Undaunted by traditional conceptions of literary and intellectual property, fans raid mass culture, claiming its materials for their own use, reworking them as the basis for their own cultural creations and social interactions.” Now I’m not implying that every music blog lives up to this ideal, or that all music blogs are worthwhile reads, or that most are even actively aware that they’re doing this. But I think that shifting the focus a bit, and beginning to regard music blogs as an online fan culture, and a unique (if only highly symbolic) challenge to the hegemonic structure of corporate-owned media culture, can result in many more interesting conversations than just seeing them as a composite of their capricious effect on music popularity. Inherent in fandom is a groupish mindset (that’s where the “dom” comes from). Fans tend to embrace others with the same tastes, rather than reject them (which pits them against the prevailing isolationist stereotype of indie rock, but that’s for another time).
The uniqueness of music blogs as a fan culture extends to its motivations, and there is a strong propensity to work with a model parallel to the dominant one. Therefore, it’s impossible to speak of music blogs without mentioning their promotional capacity, especially because small (and even some big) labels often rely on them for grass roots pre-release pushing. But despite the clear involvement of blogs in the broad sphere of online music promotion (to the extent that some bloggers have quit day jobs to live off ad revenue), I still feel strongly that the originating impulse with music blogging—much more than with political, gossip, or tech blogging—is one rooted in fandom, positivity, and subjectivity, which can obviously present itself in bizarre, confusing, and contradictory ways. Music blogs exist in a parallel universe to the dominant methodologies of music promotion, criticism and distribution, and it’s important to realize that they have internalized large amounts of both forms, reforming them through the lens of fandom. Blogs aren’t close to being responsible for any sort of sea change in the music industry—they’re much too small to take credit for that—but it’s important to note that they are reflective of the current, confusing, up-in-the-air state of affairs.
Music blogs are indicative of a new agency possessed by music fans, and the desire of many to (symbolically) make their presence known to (theoretically) whomever would like to read and listen. So, I suppose I’d urge those of you with a propensity toward browsing music blogs to take a step back, put on your ethnographic glasses for a moment and look at them for what they are: expressions of the personal tastes of a slim demographic group of mostly males, merged with the unique (and problematic) materialism of the Web. They give insight into not only the prevailing (and intensely capricious) indie-rock zeitgeist, but also into what comprises an online “identity.” As much as it’s probably unfair to regard Idolator as just a “music gossip” blog, I think it’s equally shortsighted to look at the widely diverse network of music blogs as simply “agenda pimpers” or even amateur critics. Just shifting the perspective on blogs a little bit, from criticism to fandom, could unearth the existence of a largely unnoticed and misinterpreted, but fascinating online music fan culture. And it could also prove Idolator’s slogan as on the right track: “All About the Music…If Only It Were.”
Most of the time essays or comments that try to paint all blogs’ portraits in broad strokes annoy the hell out of me, especially when writers use a stereotype to trash a band that’s received blog hype. This post, though, is a pretty accurate view. I think you’re more fair than probably necessary to those folks who just copy and paste press releases. Thanks for providing some perspective.
I do wish that more bloggers would admit that, deep down, ads or no ads, they’re blogging for themselves, and that it’s okay to admit that.
Yes. Making recommendations is as much about being praised for making the recommendation as it is for uniting your friend with something you know they’ll love. This is partially why we resist over-enthusiasm.
~~Music blogging is not only a niche enterprise, it’s a niche blogging enterprise…~~
I was just thinking about this. Being fully submerged in the blogosphere, I often forget to come up for air and realize that although it seems like “everyone” is talking about Annuals/Grizzly Bear/Long Winters/etc., in the “real world,” these bands are basically non-existent. I mean, the average American has no idea who Sufjan Stevens is…AMAZING, right!?
And the fact that there are food/literary/political/tech/etc. blogospheres out there that are quite possibly discussing the same notions of “what is blogging?” sort of blows my mind.
p.s. Amira told me Forrest got a shirt that says, “No one cares about your blog.” Ain’t that the truth.
An excellent post, Eric. You’re right that an examination of musicblogging’s causes offers some ripe and interesting material (just as its effects offer fertile ground for journalists). And yet the writer in me remains frustrated that there aren’t more people thinking about the -substance- of musicblogs. What is written, and in what way. That remains the thing I think most about – trying to put my finger on why I find musicblogging special, or new, or fresh; and why I like certain musicblogs and find others repellent or merely old-fashioned. I can’t even articulate it properly. (Matt Perpetua’s much better at this.) In the case of Said the Gramophone, Dan and especially Jordan don’t even -read- other musicblogs, let alone enter into dialogue with them. Haven’t you noticed how many hundreds of musicbloggers seem to exist in a funny kind of vacuum, alone with their own loves? This isn’t by any means to contradict your thesis – but it just leaves me thinking, once again, of the things that are left out.
Great, great piece. (Any reference to ethnography AND Henry Jenkins immediately wins me over, admittedly.) I wondering what your thoughts are about bloggers who choose to remain anonymous or semi-anonymous: “Brooklyn Vegan” immediately comes mind….And additionally what happens when those music blogs start to get paid (?) to do regular columns, radio shows, etc.
I’m sure you’ve already percolating posts about this, though.
My first impulse upon reading your fandom thesis was to disagree, even though I totally agree (which I think you know) with most of your other conclusions, esp. the selfish factor. But on second thought–and I can’t remember if you mentioned–music blogging is in so many ways a natural outgrowth of print zines, just mediated through technology. Though I think some of us aren’t primarily motivated by music fandom (as I’ve said, I could just as easily be blogging on several other things I love and be just as happy) participation in some kind of alternative community challenging dominant modes of media consumption seems like a big part of it. Sometimes I wonder, though, if the community aspect damages the integrity and limits the creativity of individual blogs. Just a vague thought.
Oh, and I totally feel like a lab rat now.
great piece. i’m wondering if you’ll also plan on looking at an inevitable (or lack thereof) of the downstream influence that blogs have have on those things that still influential mass audiences. is MTV ever going to deem a “blog rock” band worthy of attention. CYHSY, Tapes and Arcade Fire never seemed to catch on.
I absolutely love your posts on this topic. It reminds me of your old post “morningwood vs. we are scientists vs. who gives a damn”
Very thought out. And very true.
Another interesting and thought-provoking post, Eric. Thanks.
Adam, subcultural things always have a way of entering the mainstream, though it’s not a direct path most of the time. It’s a culture of influence more than anything else, especially as the people involving in the creation and promotion of art are informed by a subculture that’s slightly ahead of the curve. The issue is not to “break” artists into the mainstream as it is about nudging subcultures into different directions that later bear fruit in the mainstream.
A few thoughts:
Mostly I blog for myself, yes, as an ongoing excuse to seek out new music. The songs I post are the ones that I wouldn’t mind listening to over and over again; they all go into a big playlist in iTunes, so I’m crafting my own radio station, something that’s how I wish radio stations in Gainesville FL were.
Sometimes I pick songs that suck, though I don’t know it at the time–I come back to them some time later and wince and ask myself what the fuck I was thinking, and uncheck the box to the left so I don’t have to hear them again. But I leave them in the list as a reminder that I need to keep an eye on whether the song is really good, and durably good, not just if it satisfies some momentary impulse.
Making money off mp3blogging? Gauche. Other people can do it if they want; that’s fine; but it’s not for me. I’d be happy just to get a better job so I could afford a little more bandwidth and a lot more new music (more LPs, more CDs, better emusic account). I’d also be delighted to continue not being sued, which brings me to the “buy” links. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m using them for a garlic necklace: I don’t want to be sued for trying to show–not just talk about, but show–others why I love a particular song or artist. I know that what I’m doing is promotional, even if it’s also selfish; and if people love the tracks and buy the music then that’s great. Honestly, though, I don’t know what the clickthrough rate on all of that is since I don’t have any affiliate accounts. If people don’t buy the CD, well, I never have bought a Journey CD, though they’re on a hell of a lot of radio stations and I haven’t been able to avoid hearing them.
I know I have an audience, but I have no idea what they want, or if any of them want the same things. Probably they don’t; the songs aren’t all the same so the audience probably isn’t monolithic.
Traffic is a crude metric for popularity, but I’m not going to promote every shitty band that sends me an email just because it would probably get a link back from their site. Also, traffic is not the same as approval (that’s the old FBI mistake of assuming that reading something equals agreeing with it).
Yes, it’s nice when people like something I post, and it makes me happy to hear that someone I respect liked something I did, but I think that most of us mp3bloggers probably post on other mp3bloggers’ sites because we see the traffic and realize that a lot of people come and download or play the tracks and then go do something else without commenting. I’m guilty of it too, sometimes, even on sites I like a lot. Sure, those of us not in it for the money are still posting for selfish reasons, but we’re gernally also at least a little insecure, and we want to know if people who /don’t/ just want our publicity even give a damn about the work.
//all just my opinions, and maybe all wrong.
Good God, that should have been a separate post.
Your main point in your last paragraph—that music blogs should be regarded as part of a larger fan culture instead of as conduits of criticism—sort of credits and discredits blogs simultaneously, but I think I agree with it. But only somewhat: it seems contradictory to the fact that your writing style is deftly academic.
I also agree that motivations for blogging are inherently selfish, otherwise bloggers wouldn’t be tripping over themselves to be the first to post something or to secure exclusives from labels. Sure, people wouldn’t do this if they didn’t care about music, but people also wouldn’t do this if they didn’t think it would bring more people to their site. Everyone wants success, and everyone wants recognition, especially if it comes in an area in which they’re passionate.
Like you said, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
(In reverse order)
Ryan–I think that you may have misunderstood me a bit…I wasn’t saying that blogs should be regarded in any way, but only that looking at them as a culture of causes, rather than effects, might give some more insight into the latter. And as far as style goes, academic or not, I think that plays directly into the fan culture point, emphasizing the cause (I write b/c I like to write) rather that what happens (does “deftly academic” writing influence popularity?)
Tuwa–I didn’t give you my freelance rate card, but I’m going to copy and paste that into a future post. You’ll hear from my agent. I do like your reference to a reformed version of radio, though, especially because that’s one of the main comparisons popularly applied to music blogs, er, or “mp3j’s.”
Amy–The whole “remediation” thing is something that deserves its own chapter as well. The radio model above, the curatorial model, and certainly the zine model all get their due in different forms on different blogs. I sort of glancingly referred to it, when I talked about how promotion and distribution have be re-formed, but it definitely deserves more attention. Another thing I’m interested in is the sort of intellectual strata of blogs, or how “sub-cultural” capital” is spent, resulting in academic or thought-piece blogs, and also those based solely on enthusiasm.
Kathryn–The “anonymous” bloggers are definitely interesting, but I think a case could be made for them being perhaps more brand-savvy than others–so they’re always referred to as “BV” or something, instead of his real name. Or it could just be a case of crippling shyness, as well. And those who make the jump over to other forms of media, or get paying jobs writing for other online publications, I think, are representative of the clear remediation w/in blogs of so many other forms of media (radio, zine, etc.). I wanted to work Levi-Strauss and bricolage in here, and how bricolage transforms the bricoleur, etc., but yeah. Later, let’s hope.
Sean–The “vacuum” is an interesting phenomenon, and I can’t say I’m too familiar with it, probably due to my ever-increasing addiction to music blogs of all stripes. But it does raise an interesting point about style and form, and how those are determined by the medium, or even, more broadly speaking, the technology. Like, Dan and Jordan, to some degree, are interacting within a fan culture despite their abject refusal to sign their union cards and show up for Sunday morning meetings, due to the fact that they share much in common in, er, form, if not rhetoric or style, with the other bloggers. And your blog and backstory definitely raise some interesting issues about the relationship between zines and music blogs.
Pete–I definitely want to go into more detail about where exactly music blogs split from ye olde traditional blogs, and what their connection with the music industry(ies), especially the biggies, does to define them, what they can/can’t say, how they form their identities, etc. I think that political, gossip and tech blogs have much, much, much more influence over their respective fields of coverage than do music blogs, or food blogs or film blogs &c.
Eric, I actually want to hear what you have to say about the incest of what type of music is being pushed. I’ve taken a year away from constantly keeping up with every new band and got an mp3 disc from a friend of what I missed and hot damn, it’s sh*t.
The idea of new and innovative have been branded to mean: sounds like Pavement. From there, most of the bands pushed by these blogs seem like exponential parodies of one another.
Take Arcade Fire. A great innovative sound and record. They blow up in all their sounds like David Byrne glory and the next darling of the blogs is Clap Your Hands: who sounded even more like David Byrne imitating Thom Yorke. And then every band afterward is singing in bizarre, high-pitched inflections.
You’re speaking, I think, more about the good bloggers or the ones you know who seem to be honest and earnest. But when I read most music blogs, it feels like I’m watching a weird, incestual game of telephone.
I’m more interested in the fact that “sounds like Pavement” stuff never sounds even remotely like Pavement, and how that’s indicative of an entire generation’s lazy lack of a proper frame of reference.
Eric.
A lovely piece of writing and very thought provoking. However I am only leaving this comment so that my identity is linked to it in some way. I think I’ll stop thinking and go and listen to some music instead
Keep up the good thoughts.
Tim
Tim, I think that’s a good idea, you selfish bastard.
Wes–Cycles of influence are a hard thing to pin down and an even tougher thing to interpret. I don’t know about the Pavement relation, but there definitely is a boringness and sameness to much indie rock these days, which gets trumpeted through music blogs more than I wish it would. But it’s still important to assess why that happens, and what impulses bloggers are acting under that makes it happen.
On a sort of related note, I was talking with someone the other day about how influences are internalized and re-formed, and I drunkenly said that I wished that the process always happened like it did with Gary Lewis and the Playboys’ “Judy in Disguise” re: Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky…” Now that would be fun.
“sounds like Pavement” is more highbrow and less embarassing than “sounds like Death Cab.”
Pavement-as-analog for ’90s indie rock is pretty standard, as is referencing ELliott Smith any time a “whispery, acoustic” artist is involved. Yeah, super-lazy.
Eric, great post. I particularly like what you said about blogs as a fan culture. There are exceptions to that rule, of course — I wouldn’t call the site of Ryan Good Hodgkins, up there, a blog. It’s a mini-Pitchfork, or at least it would like to be.
How would you characterize a site like Daytrotter, which is written from a fan perspective and on a casual level, but adheres to a more traditional journalistic style?
Tough to even know where to begin. I keep thinking up a million fragments to say or write back, but nothing that could pass for a unified response.
One thing that struck me (and this is only a half-cooked thought so bear with me) is what you said about how “fans tend to embrace others with the same tastes, rather than reject them (which puts them against the prevailing isolationist stereotype of indie rock, but that’s for another time.)”
You hold off on diving into the place where fans forming a community (loosely) unified by taste comes up against the “isolationist stereotype of indie rock,” but I wish you wouldn’t. The “telephone” effect (GREAT analogy btw, wes) is so startlingly true and says so very much about the effect and underlying causes/motivations of music blogging. With no exception I can think of, if you put a new band in the music blogosphere, and watch silently as it passes through a few hands and gets praised or posted by some combination of (who are we kidding) 20, maybe 25 people, it comes out the other end being premptively hated by the (relative!) masses who’ve barely heard the group or artist at hand. Multiply that by the fact that a blog’s review/praise writes about only a couple of songs, and that this casts onto the artist as a whole (”Tapes n Tapes are overrated”) and you’re looking at a blogosphere that is falling on top of itself…which is where I start to lose what I was getting at. I guess my point is that that particular tension — fandom vs indie rock isolationism — struck me as proof of the selfish “thing” and proof of at least half the idolato assessment, that blogs were poised to help democratize music, but that they (we) might now be rowing backwards, or at least in circles. So, like I said, it speaks to the effects and to the causes at the same time.
Sean — I totally agree and wonder why i find music blogging special. The best I can come up with is that when I read a new blog, my measure for liking it is the writing long before it’s the music, honestly. I know where to find songs, that part’s easy. But when someone’s writing is engaging enough that I think about what’s written and in what way, and i can check my understanding of that person’s taste against my own, that site becomes something I read regularly, and from there becomes music I’ll check out, whether I agree with the writer’s taste almost every time (Justin/Aquarium I’m looking in your direction) or not (Matthew, dear.)
Excellent, thoughtful post. As someone whose “music blog” isn’t necessarily only a music blog, and which is pretty damned marginal amongst them (although I don’t have any idea: I haven’t bothered monitoring), that puts my site as marginal among marginal among marginal web efforts, I guess. And yet I persist. Obviously, I’m not making money; I’m not getting famous; I’m not sleeping with supermodels – the only conclusion is that I’m writing primarily because I enjoy writing. It’s funny that that should present a problem to anyone – since it’s free, and since no one forces anyone to read it.
I wonder if the apparent concordance of taste among a number of music bloggers has less to do with demographic similarity (I’m pretty much exactly in the typical groups you describe, except I’m a few years older) than with the (somewhat circular) fact that a blog will be more popular among other music bloggers if the music it posts is popular among music bloggers. That leads to a bit of a feedback loop (although the post-hipness backlash thing plays into this – particularly among those bloggers that do seem to hang their hopes for hipness on the popularity of their blogs).
Anyway: I suppose I should link to this post, shouldn’t I.
I think the most important point you’ve made here, Eric, has to do with the fact that so much of today’s indie rock is incredibly same-y. This sort of plays into Sean’s “vacuum” comment as well. You would think that Oh No, Oh My, the Annuals, and Voxtrot were the hugest bands around, but the mainstream press (and other fringe media like college radio that are buzz builders for artists) have really failed to embrace a lot of these bands.
I work for a company that does college radio promotion as well as publicity work, and I find the disconnect between these two worlds interesting, though I’m not exactly able to suss out its etiology. Press and college radio have never totally lined up (and college radio, admittedly, is more important for buzz than actual sales), and it’s interesting to see blogs thrown into the mix with further disconnect. One would think that college radio music directors and DJs would be all over what was “hot” with the blogs (Sufjan Stevens-level artists aside, of course), but there is something of a difference.
I wonder if the blogs are a lot more insular that they even know; are blog readers mostly blog owners? I hope not, but most of the comments on posts I read directly link back to–gulp–other blogs.
My wife’s band was recently featured on a fairly large blog (plug?) and I had to explain to her and her bandmate (pretty savvy music consumers, mind you, and musicians to boot) what an MP3 blog was.
So there is still a ways to go before “paradigm shifts and all that.”
I like this ombudsmenship on your part, Eric.
Oh, and I wish I could hear a bunch of stuff that sounded like Pavement these days. If nothing else, I wish bands had better names–Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s? MSTRKRFT? That is godawful.
Interesting point about the writing, stepfatherfactory. Aside from Fluxblog, Said the Gramophone, and Girish (who posts mostly about movies, anyway), I can’t think of many mp3blogs whose writing I’ve ever thought was particularly good. I do visit most of them for the music.
Lucas and others have a good point: maybe our work isn’t having much effect at all. Frankly I’m surprised anyone can make any money at it.
P.S. Eric, you can quote me if you want; I don’t mind. Though I really have no idea how common my opinions are in the field.
This is definitely an interesting read, but then that’s to be expected here at Marathonpacks. I’ve thought a lot about music blogs, blogs in general even, and their place in the grand scheme of things and to me it seems as if the shift already happened seven to ten years ago. That’s about the time I first remember products such as Cubase, Cakewalk, the Sonic Foundry stuff, and “prosumer” video cameras really starting to find a place in stores all across the country. At that point companies learned that there’s a vast market of creative hopefuls willing to spend lots of money on hobbies. People started to hope that they could spend $4,000 and have a recording studio, or video production company, right in their own house or apartment. After all, everyone’s got some unappreciated master level creativity that could rocket them to fortune and fame if only they had the tools to do so, right? Such notions have made reality TV shows, Final Cut Pro (Apple in general), Pro Tools, You Tube, MySpace, and blogs, hot shit at one time or another. The beauty of the blog, however, lies in its appeal to everything that is stereotypically thought of as American. Blogs offer free speech to a seemingly unlimited audience at the cost of nothing more than the blogger’s time. A rise from zero to hero with just a little bit of hard work on a computer?! Whereas purchasing a DVX-100, a G5, and Final Cut Pro are an attempt to lead one out of amateurism and into the realm of the working professional video production, blogs seem to offer a similar potential to hone and share the craft of writing and yet this isn’t truly what most blogs are really about. Speaking strictly for music blogs, which I’m most familiar with, they seem to be not much more than a response to (and documentation of) personal consumerism. To me, that is precisely what music bloggers are: professional consumers.
Good points, Matt, about the convenience of media creation and distribution in the digital world. I mostly think democratization is a good thing, but it has almost totally killed music as a viable commercial model, and I still believe, however naively, that musicians deserve compensation for their work like everybody else. The whole “there’s always touring argument” is really geared to rock bands and unrealistic for a lot of ‘em.
I’m not sure if you mean that consumerism of music is a bad thing, though, and maybe you didn’t mean it as such. I hate print!
Tuwa, I didn’t want to make it sound like the blogs don’t affect anything because they do. I’m just saying that it’s good to remember why you got into the blogging game and stay away from “we are changing the world” hubris. I’ve been personal blogging since 2002 and there was this brief moment where I was getting, like, 200 hits a day and I thought, man! I am gonna make some money here! I made 20 dollars in donations. From one person. Ha. I think I wrote better before that. No pressure, just passion.
I still need the money, though.
Where was I?
One of the overlooked reasons for music blogs, author selfishness notwithstanding is that — for the reader — they offer the chance to develop a kind of social knowledge that has some application in their world outside of the blogosphere (what this article interestingly examines as “urban capital“).
In my peer group, I am probably one of the few, if not only, that goes deep into the blogs. Despite the fact that we all share very similar tastes, why am I the only one who regularly scouts the blogs for new music? One easy answer is that is the role I’ve taken in my social group. Others don’t need to troll the blogs, because for them, I become their clearinghouse (through both my actual blog — which in truth only my mom reads with any regularity — and though old fashioned peer-to-peer sharing).
In this way, blogging isn’t necessarily only an insular culture. We each cherry pick certain things from the blogosphere and bring them with us into the real world. Half my friends probably don’t realize where I discovered Catfish Haven, but they are all now fully on board… And so the end result of two to three blog posts, filtered through just one reader, has yielded 5-10 fans outside the blogosphere. So in many ways, I see blogs as being much more relevant to the outside world than they have been credited with. Granted, we’re not sending CYHSY to the Top 40, but look at how far they’ve come using blog buzz as a venue for their intial publicity.
I guess this is just to say that, while the author is certainly an important part of the equation, you can’t discount the way information is passed on through the reader and what value the reader takes from the existence of blogs..
This was an excellent read, although I have to admit that after making my way through the post and all of the comments, my head is spinning a little bit. It’s particularly thought-provoking though, due to the fact that over the course of the last week, several people have asked me why I have a music blog, and I found myself saying “um, I like music?” and then thinking about that answer after the fact. I pretty much fall under the exact description of the typical blogger, except for the fact that I’m a female, and I most definitely agree with the fact that it’s a completely selfish effort, and that I’m doing it for myself.
It’s hard to wrap my head around my exact motivation though. My stock answer for why I blog typically refers to my career as a college radio DJ, which I was doing long before I started blogging. I see blogging as a natural extension of DJing – it’s just sharing the music I love with other people. I’m definitely willing to admit that the increasing recognition and “popularity” of my site feels pretty damn nice – but I would take one email saying “wow, I found this song on your site and completely love it” over hundreds of additional hits any day. My favorite thing about DJing is something similar – phone calls from someone who wants to know what I’m currently playing.
It’s funny though, I do think we’re all a little guilty of putting too much emphasis on music blogs. Sure, collectively they have an effect, but outside of certain areas, I don’t think their hype has much influence. I live in Nashville and I’ve been to several shows featuring bands that have been blogged to death and just sold out their show in NY – and five people show up to see them here.
Thanks for writing this Eric. You definitely got me thinking.
While I process this information for a post of my own, as I’m sure many of you have or will, I just want to comment quickly on a comment.
Tuwa, you say “Lucas and others have a good point: maybe our work isn’t having much effect at all.”
I, for one, would not be where I am had the availablity of conversations like this not been so compelling over the last few years. Of course there are other factors, like education and profession and musical taste, etc, but music blogs have in a way validated my own interests in the industry, in writing, in criticism, in the acceptance of the validity of a conversation like this one: simultaneously geeky and profound.
So it is a bit like cherry picking, in that we learn from each other and go out into the world with our knowledge, whether it’s in a blog or elsewhere.
I just want to second the comment about reading the initial post and these comments and feeling like my head was spinning (if not feeling like I’m kind of stupid). Honestly, the entire reason I have a music blog is because I love music…and, more importantly, because it helps feed my addiction to getting new CDs without costing me anything beyond hosting costs. I’d like to say that it’s because I absolutely need to discover new bands first (though that doesn’t hurt, and it is nice to be thought of as a music geek within my circle of friends), or because I wanted to be able to connect with like-minded people (though knowing that people outside of my city listen to the same music as I do has been a comfort), or because I’m opinionated and like thinking that people elsewhere give credence to what I say (I am opinionated, but given the fact that no one ever leaves comments on my blog, I don’t think anyone cares about anything I post other than the MP3s)…but really, it’s all about getting free music, and lots of it. So selfish? Absolutely.
And I don’t think that music blogs have really impacted the mainstream yet, or even a large portion of the non-blogging culture for that matter. The bands I consider to be “big” are hardly known within their own cities, let alone on any larger scale…to use an example, on my site I do a larger feature/contest on a band each week. This week I’m doing a Toronto band called Henri Faberge and the Adorables…I love them to the extent that I travelled five hours for their CD release show, and the show was pretty well-attended (400 people or so, with 13 other bands on the bill, all of whom were in some way related to the Adorables). But I realize how small the band really is when I talk to other people in Toronto, most of whom have never heard of the band despite the fact that they’re huge within the (very small) community that I’m familiar with. I realize that this is Canada I’m talking about, so it’s a much smaller scale, but still — I think that being involved in music blogging throws your whole perspective out-of-whack, and makes it harder to judge the popularity of a band…and, by extension, a lot harder to judge the impact of music blogs…
Intriguing post, thanks.
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Sarah
http://www.thetreadmillguide.com