Do music blogs REALLY help independent songwriters?
By Don • Sep 19th, 2006 • Category: Songwriting News
Last week I mentioned the launch of Idolator, another music blog. Since the blogging craze began a few years ago, music blogs have been heralded as “the great equalizer ” that would make boneheaded music execs and clueless product-oriented labels a thing of the past.
As a disclaimer, Blogging Muses doesn’t really qualify as a music blog in the sense that Idolator and others are. We’re nowhere near as sarcastic and smart-assed. Besides, Blogging Muses doesn’t just cover the latest music news – we mainly just cover music news in the sense that it applies to songwriters only. Additionally, we have a bunch of how-to articles on songwriting basics, songwriting tips, and songwriting advice. These articles make Blogging Muses less of a blog per se’, and more of a regular website that just happens to have a bloggish format (if bloggish is actually a word … not sure.)
In ways it has worked. There have been many bands (and even movies) built into cultural phenomenons simply from blog buzz.
However, Idolator points out the failed promises of most music blogs, and how they – like the big corporations – end up becoming victims of their own success.
I also notice many of these music blogs don’t really cover what is GOOD. Instead I see a pattern where they cover a band that is NOT GOOD and then work to pump that band up so that it becomes COOL. (Sounds like a familiar formula doesn’t it?) Then, the moment the band become COOL and even marginally accepted by college or mainstream radio, bloggers drop them faster than Britney Spears drops babies.
When Idolator listed some great examples of this sad cycle in their manifesto I JUMPED FOR JOY! YES! SOMEONE ELSE GETS IT! Below is a snippet (and I highlighted my favorite funny line in bold … heheh):
But in the last year, the music-blog netherworld has become as homogenized and indistinguishable as the record labels themselves. What used to be a wildly unpredictable chorus of opinions has been solidified into a cabal, one that consists of a half-dozen or so self-empowered pasty white dudes daisy-chaining each others’ opinions, all using an adjective-addled lexicon that’s one part Lester Bangs, one part street-person crazy talk. Meanwhile, the bands are all starting to sound the same; If we hear one more band that sounds like a cross between Pavement and Talking Heads, we’re going to stab ourselves in the eye with an aqua-colored Nano.
Amen to that! Idolator continues:
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. Sure, the Arcade Fire and the Arctic Monkeys may have helped Other Music and Insound stay in business, but where are the overhyped would-be phenoms of the months past–your Nine Black Alps, your Mellowdrones? Most of them are stuck in a half.com limbo, the victims of not only insanely inflated expectations, but also of a cruelly cyclical mentality that builds bands up, before just as quickly knocking ‘em down.
Take the most recent victim of Internet buzz, a 20-year-old gypsy-folk wunderkind named Zach Condon, a.k.a. Beirut. After his perfectly pleasant debut album earned a rave Pitchfork review, it flew through the blogosphere, and Condon was overwhelmed with next-big-thing kudos, even breaking through the mainstream press with a New York Magazine profile. Soon enough, he was playing in front of a packed crowd at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Pool. And you know what? He was just okay–nowhere as transcendent as people were expecting, and not a disaster, either. But his so-so performance garnered tsk-tsking from bloggers in the audience, who were beginning to wonder if he was worthy of all this attention–despite the fact that many of them had been hyping him to begin with.
Do you keep up with music blogs?
If so, what do YOU think?
Do you think these music blogs are helping find some of the most promising bands and musicians?
For every example of bad effects on bands that sites like Idolator list – are there plenty of other examples that show the exact opposite? If so, could you show us?
If you are a regular music blog reader, Blogging Muses would love to hear from you.
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Don is the founder, writer and editor of BloggingMuses.com. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, USA.
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Personally I think it is a beautiful thing. I think a person could build a whole career without ever performing live or making a publick appearance at all. JC
I love the sentiment of the idea if not the idea itself JC. I ask myself, ‘if this were possible, what would be the point’. Certainly earning money is out of the question because nothing sells on the net (sorry indie’s but ya know what I’m sayin), and sittin behind a PC all day earns you no show dough either. Also, as most musicians know, there’s another ancillary reason to perform live – women, or members of the opposite sex. And ya get none of that either.
I guess you could live off your fame in some way… much the same way the dude who played Chewbacca did… but I don’t know that dude either.
I think JC’s point should be heeded because the future being predicted is just around the corner (whether Paul thinks it is realistic to make a living on Internet business or not). Few recordings of early blues singers have survived because many did not see the value in making recordings which did NOT make them money while live performances did. They could not have imagined an era in which artists would willingly loose money touring to promote the sales of a record as their primary livelyhood. To answer the above question, as in the world of business, a blog that does nothing but hype or criticize will have little sway with the majority of music fans anyway, but blogs that produce media rich audio and video of performances or those created by the artists themselves not as a promotional gimmick but as an expression of who they are will have a tremendous impact on the music industry and may spell the end of both record labels and media journalism as we know it today. There’s much more to ponder on this subject that goes far beyond a few smart-ass bloggers.
Hey Shawn, interesting analogy about the blues players. Admittedly, later on there was a time when musicians would lose money touring to hawk albums. I found interviews with Eddie Van Halen in the 80′s saying that they barely broke even on tours, but that was alright because the album sales was where it was at. Nowadays though it seems that has gone 180 degrees. Today it has been shown that bands barely make anything off albums and instead make the brunt of their money on touring. Naturally there are exceptions, but that seems to generally be the case. I think there is a constant cycle between good music and gimmicks, but ultimately (due to human nature) the good music and true artists will be the ones to survive and enjoy longevity. TO be fair many great artists have used gimmicks to springboard themselves onto a world platform. Beck comes to mind with the song “Loser”. So does Radiohead with the song “Creep”. Both very gimmicky songs, but bands that moved beyond the gimmicks and became true artists.