As for the criticism part, a lot of it is aggressively shitty. When it's not, it's a paste and clip of someone else's work, often uncredited. For some reason, blogs and music don't mix for me--I find the whole thing very tedious unless it's done with pure love and brevity.

jasonelias

mhulot

When we give over full control solely to popularism ("the most eyeballs," "the most googled"), we gravitate everything to the middle of the bell curve, and in the end, everything is distilled down to utter blandness. So yes, some outlets actually are "holier than thou," and yes, some outlets are "haters," and yes, they actually go against the "mass consensus love-in" vibe that pervades everything. And thank god for that!

Catbirdseat

CarsmileSteve

mongrel21

as media outlets you are ALL in the same soup, competing for traffic / eyeballs / readership / viewership / listenership / etc. etc. bc that is what makes you have your jobs, whether you need the numbers for advertisers to buy in or you're a subscription service WHATEVER. don't try to fool folks into thinking that there are some media outlets more holy than others because of tehir content...

save places like WFMU and Arthur Mag - and even they have a target demographic and readership they are obliged to maintain in order that they continue to have the money to operate - all you music outlets, the Pitchforks and the MTVs, everyone, is all merely abiding by the same capitalist rules we all have to in these societies we live in.

so for GOOD GOD, QUIT HATING!!! its just not the season for it;)

worldsfair

science vs romance

For real, I think Moerex makes an important point - the spread of large-file download sites has very much changed the proverbial game. At the very least, it's created an entire community of album-blogging that I think differs significantly from the song model that my site (and others) have traditionally followed. Strangely, I know few places that seem to be talking about this; you're having entire genres being archived and made available for download. It raises all kinds of philosophical, ethical and legal questions.

odub

EF Matt

KinetiQ

For me the most annoying aspect of this article is that it reads like it was written in 2004, when mp3 blogging was a relatively fresh & new concept and the field was relatively uncluttered. The advent of SendSpace & similar filesharing conceits in early 2006 resulted in an exponential increase in the number of blogs out there, especially the ones that, yes, do just go out to elbo.ws, see what's driving the most interest at the moment, and post links to more of the same, usually without a shred of any illuminating commentary. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "music crit 2.0," however.

moerex

mike a

Jfrankparnell

I really think it's up to the artists to steer themselves away from too much blog-love too early. Maybe there's room out there for "online-only publicists" whose job is to manage buzz and keep the bands from being cannibalized by the scene?

Jasonbob7

[img91.imageshack.us]

too perfect.

(sorry for the poor image quality. MS paint is the most advanced program on this damned work computer.)

Weezy F Baby

DavidWatts

CultureBully

Ned Raggett

SuperUnison

the queen of blogs, lily allen, has sold about 300,000 in the u.s. amy winehouse, who can be considered a mainstream success, has sold four times that -- and it wasn't blogs that got her to that level.

grant hart had a quote about underground music. he said (i'll try to get it right...the quote is really old) bands toil away in the underground, occasionally see the bright lights of the mainstream and then run back to the safety of the underground. that's music blogs for ya. they are not trying to break the next mainstream success. they're happy living in an underworld world of a thousand little unpopular niches.

coolfer

Nicolars