Idolator
Over the weekend, a reporter at Reuters must have been Googling Beyonce, because he found a bunch of videos from the deluxe version of B'Day on a few blogs, and turned it into a trend piece:
A new breed of music bloggers, focused as much on downloadable music videos as on audio files, had gotten hold of clips ripped from an advance version of [Beyonce's] video "album" and were posting them in the iPod Video-friendly MPEG-4, or MP4, format.
The trend appears to be a looming headache for the recording industry as it continues to attempt to convert music videos into a revenue stream, whether it's through sales of videos via iTunes or through new ad-supported models from YouTube.
Among the sites posting clips were the blogs New Music Now, Ali's Blog and Music for All, which were offering the videos via file-transfer sites like rapidshare.com, evilshare.com and megaupload.com. ...
"This is a distinct segment of the blogsphere," says Mark Ghuneim, CEO of Wiredset, a New York-based digital marketing consulting firm. "They are more focused on attention and traffic than the usual suspects of bloggers who have started to play well with media practices."
We looked at the three blogs linked in the Reuters story, and calling it a "distinct segment" is accurate—in fact, all three blogs link to one another, and frequently thank each other for finding links on Rapidshare and Sendspace. But we're not sure how much of a "new breed" they are, really, as far as technology goes; sites like cliptip and antville have been linking to high-quality versions of music videos for some time now, albeit for academic purposes beyond "what u think of the vid???" It's probably also fair to note that the audio:video ratio on these new blogs seemed to be around 1:1. So why not talk about how these newer blogs are skewing toward radio-ready pop, instead of highlighting the video component? That, to us, is an even bigger story, and it's one that really shows how blogging about music is becoming less of a niche amusement. We can't wait to see what the elbo.ws top 10 will look like three months from now.
Comments
That's actually a Billboard article getting picked up by Reuters, and it's by my bud Brian Garrity. Seeing it in the magazine last weekend, I surmised that he was given a pretty tight space in which to write it - the page was pretty packed.
Given the magazine's audience (as opposed to Reuters' readership), I think he had to write from the here's-another-category-of-music-stuff-people-are-trading-free angle first, before anything else. You guys are right that the move toward mainstream pop among music blogs is the most interesting angle - but Brian touches on it briefly toward the end of the story, with a quote from our own coolfer:
Editor of music news blog Coolfer.com Glenn Peoples says, "These sites show music blogging is going more mainstream in taste. It's not just for indie-rock fans."
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