Idolator

I'd be shirking my metablogging duties if I didn't mention that the music issue of the Oxford American looks at the blog-band hype cycle through the prism of Annuals (remember them?), who were tearing up the MP3 blog world a little more than a year ago. Bill Wasik's piece traces the origins of the band's online popularity, and the way that the phrase "get ready to get sick of this band" could be used to describe any number of hype-torrent campaigns that have made their way around the Internet during the music-blog era: More »

Downtown Records, the home to Gnarls Barkley, Art Brut, and the Cold War Kids, is planning on launching a new label with a slightly different, slightly bloggy business model later this year: More »

Today, Microsoft officially announced the specs for the Zune, the portable media device that they're hoping will loosen Apple's tight grip on the digital media market. Our gadget-crazed brother Gizmodo has the specifics on the launch — the Zune's two biggest selling points are its three-inch color screen and its wireless capabilities, which will allow users to send music files back and forth between each other. Beamed music will have a shelf life of "three days or three plays," which seems to be just long enough to allow a user to either totally get sick of a song or totally be convinced to buy it from the Zune-branded store, the Zune Marketplace. More »