MP3 Blogs

Our homie Steve over at Little White Earbuds dropped a nice story on RA about the effect of MP3 blogs. As you can see from our links section, we link to quite a few MP3 blogs. The main difference in what I look for in an MP3 blog is that they are putting up old, rare, and hard to find records that just aren’t available for you to buy new anyway. But I think it is good for people to get these issues out in the open and discussed, so that things like TAPE’s recent request from Strictly Rhythm to take down a deejay mix that featured their tune on it has some established consensus to govern the discussion.

I feel like taking things to the extreme that Strictly Rhythm wants to go to is pretty much a dead end for everyone involved. It makes it hard for a blog to provide any musical content, and almost impossible for any deejays to express themselves. There has to be a happy middle ground where people can use music in mixes without there being an argument that labels are “losing sales” because of it. This has been the status quo for deejay mixes for the past 25+ years, and now that most mixes online are being given away for free (instead of charging like many people did for tapes and CDs that the labels were not seeing a penny from) it really makes no sense to go hardline now.

Steve actually asked me a few questions back in January about this issue as we have never put up MP3s of tracks for our readers to download. My comments have been edited out of the final article, but as this issue is one I feel strongly about, I want to share my replies here:

01. Why did you choose not to offer mp3s on your blog? What do you hope to accomplish?

When we started infinitestatemachine, we wanted to create a place where a certain viewpoint of dance music could be fostered. To do that, we decided to talk very broadly about music and dance music culture. We currently live in a society that has a very short attention span, so we wanted people to slow down and actually think about what we say and then interact with us and use the comments to talk about ideas and music with us. Personally, I was influenced by Richard Brophy’s Test blog and how he did things there, but while we share some similar tastes, we at ISM have something very different to say. I feel like we have been pretty successful, especially for a blog that caters to a pretty undefined yet specific kind of music listener,
but our goal is to show the larger group of dance fans that dance music has deep roots and a history that means something.

02. What impact, both postive and negative, do you think blogs offering free mp3 has?

In the positive column, the ability for people to hear music that they wouldn’t have had such easy access to before the days of the internet has increased wildly. The barriers between underground and mainstream have been decimated, the physical distance between an artist and their fanbase has also been overcome. Someone in Europe can post an mp3 of an act from Africa and have people in Australia, Asia and the Americas going nuts for it. Promotion on that scale with nearly no budget would have been impossible just a few years back. now it is almost assumed. But none of that means much if the listeners never pay for the music! For older music, i think mp3 blogs can and do play a very important role in helping to unearth and expose songs that might be impossible for anyone to actually purchase in any way. The ability to get these sounds out there is one of the great powers of the internet, since it would be impossible to find and contact many of the original artists about a legitimate licensing and re-release. In fact, I would be willing to bet that some legit re-releases have come from the popularity of a track online!

The main problem I see these days with free mp3s is that it makes it very easy for people to not support the people who put out the music. I know many record label owners, and I know about their successes and troubles going in to the post-vinyl days ahead. Nearly everyone is
offering some kind of mp3s for sale, the revenue from these sales is going to be essential in keeping the labels afloat. It’s not as if they are charging crazy money for them either, and you can generally preview them before you purchase them. In effect, giving away these mp3s is going to limit what labels can do by limiting their income. There is definitely a good argument for the demise of major labels as their creativity ran out quite a long time ago, but these indie labels who are run by specialists provide an ever important filter for good music in addition to paying the artist for their efforts. Even in the case of artists who decide to go solo selling mp3s, not everyone can tour the world and get paid to do it. Getting a small bit of income from selling their songs online is hardly something that real music fans should want to see end.

Music generally seems to be devalued these days because of the availability of free mp3s. The iPod’s claims of “stores 100,000,000,000 songs!” or however many it is illustrates that beautifully. How many people are really listening to all the music that is out there? It seems as if people want to have all these mp3s so they have bragging rights over their friends or something. It’s no wonder that people don’t want to support the artists, if you have 20,000 mp3s and you pay even $.50 each for them, that’s $10,000! That is no small chunk of change. Of course corporations selling mp3 players like Apple still make their money, so what do they care if you purchased the music on your iPod or not? Unless you purchase it from them, in which case you have to pay them again! Everyone is leeching off of artists, music is even more of a commodity today than it ever was before. Yet the people who make the music that touches you are the only ones not getting paid. How ridiculous is that?

03. Do you personally download mp3s from blogs? Do you purchase the tracks you like?

Yeah, i do download mp3s that some blogs have to offer. However, for the most part it is only the old, obscure, out of print, and hard to find tracks that I wouldn’t be able to just go find new in a shop to hear and then purchase. Everything that i download that I like goes immediately onto my wants list. If I do download a new mp3 that I like, I always buy the 12″. When I deejay, I play only vinyl records: I’ve never played a CD, I’ve never played a digital file in any way. So having something as an mp3 is completely worthless for me, unless I’m downloading something I already have on vinyl that I am too lazy to rip myself. I always like to have the real thing, a file is just 0’s and 1’s.

I come from a culture of buying records, be it punk 7″s when I was younger or the jungle 12″s that got me into dance music and thus into deejaying. Pittsburgh has a crazy used vinyl market, I was obsessed with the sound, the sleeves and digging through dusty records before I
even knew that there was a whole way of life that revolved around records. My grandfather and I were the two big music nerds in my family, we were able to bond over our love of music and specifically records. He gave me my first Technics back in the mid 90’s, a direct drive predecessor to the 1200’s that I somehow broke after I got a pair of 1200’s to deejay with. Now, my son is 6 years old and all he knows is records. He likes going record shopping and he has his own little record collection that we listen to together. Having those physical representations of music and listening to them together with other people is something that the iPod generation is missing. But for me, that is one of the most important parts of it! So I always buy the record.

04. Do you think blogs offering mp3s is of any value to artists/blogs? Do you think there’s a better way of making tracks listenable for readers?

On infinitestatemachine, what we offer is deejay mixes as mp3. I think this is a perfect compromise as it allows us to further express ourselves by putting the music we love in the context that is the hallmark of our blog, and it lets people hear the songs! Context is such an important thing when it comes to music. Many blogs out there post up nothing but a link to the mp3 of a song, maybe they’ll toss a little blurb about it in there but it’s not much. The actual interaction of the blogger in posts like that is nearly nil, that doesn’t interest me as much as someone who can really say something along with providing good tunes to listen to. If you think about the Electrifyin’ Mojo [the famous Detroit radio deejay constantly namechecked for helping start techno], it was not just his selection of awesome tunes that made him so influential, it was also his personality and how he interacted with the people listening. A music blog is not all that different from that! You can be a tastemaker and get good music out there for people to hear, but people like personality as well. If you have good music and good personality, you can really touch people and that is what music is all about, right?

Another really easy way to get the music out there in a better way is to let the artist decide. Some bloggers have been asking for permission from the artists themselves to post tracks, it’s so simple to do with the internet at your disposal! If that is too much effort, it’s always easy to post a link to the artist’s site or myspace page where they have already decided what they want people to be able to hear. We at ISM tend to do things like that, let the reader do their own legwork. In the end, if the music means something to them, they won’t mind.

Maybe our philosophy is unsound, but we have received nothing but love from any artists we deal with so I like to hope that we are considered to be doing good for the music. That is what we are all about.