"Get ready to get sick of hearing about this band"—it would be difficult to think of a more apt motto for indie rock in the age of the Internet. A loose genre defined not by any sound but rather by its opposition to (or exclusion from) corporate radio and labels, indie rock evolved out of the hardcore scene of the 1980s, at a time when finding out about important new bands depended much on whom you knew or where you were: News spread almost exclusively through word of mouth, through photocopied 'zines (often with circulations in three or even two digits), or through low-watt college radio stations.

Today, indie-rock culture remains an underground culture, basically by definition, in that its fans shun mainstream music in favor of lesser-known acts. But now, MySpace, iTunes, and Internet radio make location and friends irrelevant for discovering music. Blogs and aggregators enable fans to determine in just a few minutes what everyone else is listening to that day. What you know, where you are—these matter not at all. To be an insider today one must merely be fast. Once Mike found out that Pitchfork would be posting about the new band, one cannot blame him for his haste, because après Pitchfork, le déluge: Unknown bands become all-too-familiar bands in a month, and abandoned bands the next month. Get ready, that is, to get sick.

And as a companion piece of sorts, the proprietor of Pretty Goes With Pretty spun Wasik's piece into a must-read four-part series called "Can't Talk; Hyping," in which he discusses the churn of the music blogosphere and what he sees as the motivations of its writers:

You forget that half these blogs are outsiders in shitty apartments in Pensacola or Indianapolis, who likely started their little blogs because they loved music. Worse, they forget.

They post about multiple new bands per day with little articulation of what's worthwhile about them, aside from an audio clip, myspace link, a list of tour dates, and—not always—a perfunctory they're grrrreat! I guess they're assuming the music will speak for itself. Ultimately it does, of course, but rarely are mp3 blogs a true reflection of one person's tastes. There was a time when it seemed like most blogs were digging for new music. More recently, the passion seems to have been replaced by some kind of faux professionalism. At best they tell you what's good, not what's great. They're giving you all the dirt: you do the digging.

The problem of music blogs "[telling] you what's good, not what's great" has been a problem that I've had with the format—and its attendant charts—for some time. Especially now, with the increase of PR departments that promote their attendant bands' wares exclusively to blogs (which, as PGWP correctly points out, does so because it's interested in large part in "keeping its enemies close"), it's a lot easier for all those proclamations of "good" (or even "existent") to stack up in such a way that they sort of resemble the idea of "greatness." And what's most troubling to me about that, particularly recently, is the way those implicit declarations have fallen pretty much entirely in line with the e-mails that land in my inbox.

One of the earliest Idolator features was Track Marks, which traced bands' ascent on the elbo.ws charts via blog posts about them; over time, that feature became mostly used for figuring out how, exactly, music-related rumors got started, mainly because the narrative "this MP3 showed up in my inbox, then it sprang up everywhere" got kind of tedious to write. (Although we do reserve the right to go back to that feature's well again, if only because the Vampire Weekend "overheralded demo setting the stage for pre-first-album backlash" phenomenon seems to be replicating itself all over the place these days.) And I think the current state of the RSS feed outlined by Pretty Goes With Pretty—the lack of critical filters, the rise of the "promo MP3" and having to respond to that and only that if one is going to craft a post about a band, the symbiotic relationship between PR companies' aims and music bloggers' content—has also resulted in burnout on my end, with there being so much chatter and noise that I've gone back to only really trusting recommendations from friends and a few hand-picked sources in order to find out about new music. (Or I just tune it all out and watch TRL, even though it only shows full videos when it suffers from "technical difficulties.")

And really, when was the last time a blog "broke" a band beyond the one-shot promo MP3 catching fire? Sure, a large part of that is because the growth of the music-blog world has resulted in things becoming so diffuse that it's hard to have a "hit" beyond the most popular Usual Suspects Of Indie, but sometimes I wonder if the burnout as far as blogs, and music blogs, and the relentless torrent of new music, isn't something that's solely in my mind, and if there's just such a glut of bands and hypemen, you need to escape from it all by just going into another world for a while. Like TRL, for example. Or, as PGWP puts it:

... many of the bands proffered on hype blogs have no Genuine Listeners. For that we must buy albums, must sit with them, alone, undistracted, and hear them through our own ears, process them through the context of our own lives. For that, you've got to log off.

Pretty Goes With Pretty [prettygoeswithpretty.typepad.com]
Hype Machine [Oxford American]

In a move designed to upend the traditional record label business model, Downtown Records and Internet entrepreneur Peter Rojas plan to launch an online-only record label that will offer its music for free and generate revenue only through advertising and sponsorships, The Post has learned.

Dubbed RCRD LBL and targeted for launch this fall, the venture aims to merge free, exclusive music with niche blog content to offer advertisers highly targeted sponsorship opportunities. Or, to put it another way, the label marries Downtown's ability to identify cutting-edge artists - the label's roster includes blog-beloved bands like Gnarls Barkley and Cold War Kids - with the architecture of Rojas' weblogs to create a next-generation online music company.

One source familiar with the project described it as a "curated YouTube or MySpace for music with an editorially driven filter."

While this new venture hasn't actually signed any artists yet, that hasn't stopped investors from being optimistic:

According to a preliminary business outline obtained by The Post, the venture offers advertisers three different levels of sponsorship packages that feature a combination of contest, podcast and "single of the week" sponsorships as well as advertising plug-ins that run over the course of several months.

Sources said the idea seems to have a lot of traction judging by initial conversations with Madison Avenue.

While these sources declined to provide revenue projections for the venture, they did say that they were "confident that the Web site will generate significant revenue early on."

While we agree that labels have to look beyond the idea of record sales being the prime source of revenue, we have to say that the label's prospects for success aren't certain—after all, they'll still depend on which artists the label signs, a list that is currently empty. Yes, Downtown has a great track record as far as spotting buzzy bands that get a lot of online attention, and the music's low cost will certainly help as far as stoking initial awareness—but the assumption that audiences will be as enthusiastic about these bands as advertisers are is a big jump, blogs or no blogs, and it's reflective of the "we will tell you what you'll like" attitude that's helped larger record labels get into the mess they're in right now.

USING ADS, NEW ONLINE LABEL OFFERS MUSIC FREE [NYP]

[Disclosure: Rojas is the Chief Strategy Officer for Weblogs, Inc., a competitor of Idolator's parent company, Gawker Media.]

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.

If it seems that all your favorite music blogs are a little Zuned out this afternoon, there's a reason why.

In a move that makes us wonder if the Zune team is a bit more savvy than we normally give Microsoft credit, influential MP3 bloggers were flown out for a Zunetastic junket. Stereogum's lengthy analysis, which went up at the stroke of noon ET, does an excellent job of breaking down the Zune's pros (the screen, the beaming capability) and cons (the only size available is 30GBand the price tag is $300), while My Old Kentucky Blog notes that blogosphere faves Cansei de Ser Sexy and Band of Horses will be among the artists integrated into the Zune's branding.

As Stereogum notes, Microsoft seems to be going for the "community" angle with the Zune, from the aforementioned song-beaming to the music-blogger appeasing roster (will Cansei de Ser Sexy really move more than five or six units?). Which all sounds one-world groovy until you realize that portable music-listening—unlike, say, playing a video game—is a pretty solitary exercise; for example, "can I beam you this song?" really doesn't work as a pickup line, especially when the person you're trying to pick up has "Ring the Alarm" blaring out of tightly affixed headphones.

If anything, though, the initial problems with the Zune won't lie in its it's-all-good marketing strategy; it's the limitations of the hardware. The lack of version 1.0 options—the Zune won't be compatible with iTunes or Apple, it's only available in 30 GB, and it comes with a steeper-than-an-iPod price—still makes the iPod a more attractive alternative. Unless they recruit one of the remaining digital-store holdouts—The Beatles, Led Zeppelin—to the Zune Marketplace, it looks like Microsoft will retain its underdog status in the portable media player realm until it launches a second-generation version.

Microsoft Zune Gets Officially Announced [Gizmodo]
Stereogum's Sneak Peak At Zune [stereogum]