Excellent exploration on the noticeable divide as music blogging matures.
Time for this subject to come up again. You can read my own version of this post from a while back (actually I riffed off the same Rock Critics roundtable, among other bits, as this guy does). But I’ll just highlight a couple things from Condemned to RocknRoll’s post:
The inclusion of MP3s does point to a conundrum: why would you post music up for people to sample if you don’t like it? For one thing, it’s wasting your time, and if you’re a blogger who maintains a music blog as a hobby, wasting time on music you don’t like seems silly. Secondly, why would a reader read your bad review of the music and then decide to give the music a try anyway?
This is the line of thinking that always really burns me. All the kvetching about the sheeplike tendencies of mp3 blogs is precisely related to the fact that so many bloggers think it’s a waste of time to talk about stuff they don’t like. More specifically, to articulate why something isn’t good, beyond a mere “this sucks” lobbed into a comments box or message board. It’s not a waste of time, particularly if you value the fact that people are regularly reading your blog. Dislikes give shape to likes. The fact that someone might be able to explain why they think one artist is shit might add weight to an argument for another artist’s strengths. I’m not saying you have to get into compare-and-contrast lists, but regular readers will grow to know and trust your tastes.
Oh and the whole thing about text-heavy bloggers being largely professional critics - Personally I’m an exception to that idea, and I know there are plenty of other exceptions as well. Again it just goes to this whole idea of people not wanting blogging to be “a waste of time” - as if one can’t write seriously about music for fun, sans paycheck. That is the hobby! Putting an mp3 online is not a hobby, it’s an impulse.
1 year ago