Most of the complaints I have about the state of things in the music world these days have to do with the legacy industry, the old corporate record labels, and all the things that go along with them. After all, the times are changing and they have refused to change along with them. But at the same time, while their flat out refusal to adapt to the changing realities of the business has been outright shameful, they didn’t initiate the change. They have in fact done everything they can to resist it. Whether it ultimately makes sense, or hurts the consumers that provide their revenue, has been a secondary consideration.

It’s clear at this point that it would have been better if they had been open to adapting their business models, but you can hardly blame them for wanting things to stay static. After all, it’ll likely be at least another five years before a clear understanding arises as to what a sustainable business model will look like when the technological changes started in the late ‘90s come to a rest, if that ever happens. It’s a natural tendency to grip tightly to a well understood past when the future is uncertain. Just look at the conservative political revolution that roughly tracks the same period. Why move from a 50 year residency in the land of milk and honey when there is a fog bank obscuring the road ahead?

The catalyst of change is ubiquitous: the all-mighty mp3. The Fraunhofer ISS in Germany offered it up and forever changed the way most of us find, receive and listen to our music. The great agents of change have been the bloggers. Sure there was Napster, and the cascade of ways to share files online that followed it. It scared the living shit out of the music industry, for sure. The mp3 scared the establishment. It was the unknown. In 1999 a former Sierra Club President scared Sony out of $1,000,000 because he wanted to organize a benefit CD for C.A.R.E. to be released DRM free on the then newly re-named emusic.com. But Napster and the mp3 alone only threatened to hurt record sales; they didn’t change the rules of the game.

Then along came a blogger. Really the phenomenon is only about five years of age, taking its current form from Matthew Perpetua’s Fluxblog started in 2002. Anyone with a music habit and an internet connection has likely had the way they hear about music changed forever. As someone who spends 90% of his time involved in the world of indie rock, I’ve seen a positive change as a result. Who can deny the blog’s effect on the world of pop music? No longer are a few publications, or even internet sites entrusted with carrying out the targeted marketing of labels. Why work for pennies right out of college to write for Spin when you can start your own blog? Plus there’s all of those people on the street with the tell-tale white earphone buds of the iPod in they’re ears; surely they’ve got a few albums on their $300 wonder machine that they wouldn’t have if not for these new ways of discovery.

Living in San Francisco and being a part of the music community has meant that I find little reason to read music blogs. I feed my habit the oldest of old fashioned ways—by word of mouth. The truth is, I’m a tech guy. Most of what I deal with to make a living is where technology meets music. Yet, most of the time, when someone directs me to a music blog or I find my way to one out of sheer boredom, I find myself annoyed. With the exception of an exemplary few, 90% of the content on most blogs is simply regurgitated verbatim from other sources or the posting of other peoples music. People have gravitated to blogs over the years as a source of hearing new music and finding out snippets of information, like tour schedules of certain bands that were previously hard to find. But even in the half-decade since music blogs took hold, most of their value has been commandeered by even newer forms of new media. Myspace, whatever your take on that is, is even better than Pollstar’s service to the music industry for finding out a band’s tour schedule. The Hype Machine has risen to provide a searchable by artist index of all the music being posted by bloggers worldwide. With one click a player streams all currently active links to tracks from a given artist on various blogs without ever having to visit the blog’s webpage.

I was born, raised and educated in Virginia, studying government in college. One of the places I did so was at a school named after the guy who wrote the fucking constitution, and I have always put a lot of stock in his words:

A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.

James Madison is saying that it’s wholly better for a slew of assholes to litter the pages of papers with their opinions, no matter how half witted, than to have opinions be few and far between. My inclination towards this ideal, and my total disdain for the legacy of the music business, would make my annoyance with blogs seems ridiculous.

The blogs, however, are not really contributing toward their overall potential. Very little in the way of original thought exists on them. What is worse, many of their creators have developed a sense of entitlement. This past week a blogger posted a live recording of a solo performance of the frontman of a very popular rock group that I produced the audio and video recording for. It was one of many shows I’ve done so far for a film. I can barely live off what I make for my efforts and have given a year and a half of my life to this project. I noticed that he had posted the audio of the show on his blog, and I sent him an email asking him to take it down, expressing my apologies and offering to let him post it again after the film had come out. Unlike the content I’ve captured recently, this was very early on in my involvement in this film, and I myself do not actually own the recording, so it would have been my ass if the other producer had seen it up on a blog. I explained the situation in the email, saying I would be held responsible if the other producer were to stumble upon it.

The response I got back was shocking. He was completely offended that I would even ask him to take it down, stating that in three years he had never received such a request. I was astonished. After all, we paid the venue to record, paid the cameramen, and paid the audio engineer (who made a personal copy and posted it on the Live Music Archive), and it was a special moment to us. Didn’t we have the right to use it first?

The Live Music Archive has rules regulating the use of the content there, and linking to it on a blog is NOT permitted in its policy use. I was okay with it being there, as much as it pissed me off that it was posted without my permission, because I’m all for making things available to people willing to seek them out, and this is a site mostly visited by live recording enthusiasts, or “tape heads,” as I call them. But, as mentioned earlier, blogs can be catalogued on the Hype Machine, and this guy’s blog had not a sentence of his own thoughts on anything he posted about, but a link to the Hype Machine at the bottom of every posting! He is simply trying to drive hits to his blog by using the words and music of other people. Where is the good in that?

Ultimately this guy took his posting down, but only after he had simply replaced it with a link to the audio and my original email. It took a few more emails on my part appealing to him not spoil it for everyone else
who might stumble upon the recording, thus inciting the Archive to take it down, before he pulled the whole posting. He acted like an entitled brat every step of the way, like I was urinating on his god endowed right to post work he played no part in creating. I found myself with an unsettling feeling, one of empathy for the record labels and anybody else who has had their content abused by the dogma that bloggers are entitled to post whatever they wish. But I also found myself confronting a question on the other side of my usual musings. It’s one of those “chicken or the egg” questions: Is the decline of the music industry really resting solely on the shoulders of the record industry, or are the blogs facilitating an even worse state of affairs?

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