hey all - apologies for the lack of posts. snow and midterms and rain and more midterms got in the way. sloth probably had something to do with it too.
when “we” return, we will be debuting a new format that you may or may not like, but it’s our decision and we’re sticking to it. from here on out, we will no longer offer full album links on the blog itself, but will change to an mp3 file only format, offering single tracks for download (and streaming off-site). hopefully this way we can post a diverse array of upcoming artists more frequently rather than provide links of new albums that can be found pretty much anywhere.
The reason I initially started blogging was as a way to give back to the same community that enabled me to find so many different kinds of music; not just tracks, but whole albums of glorious sounds that i’d never before heard. Blogs like The Siren’s Sound, Deek Media, Bolachas, LeShake, ●no●data●, and more recently, Magiska. And while I still know that these blogs have a purpose, it’s rapidly become apparent that I can’t rival these blogs in terms of quantity, nor would I want to. The more involved I have become with blogging the more I have appreciated the ability of blogs to highlight new and promising artists, and serve as taste-makers rather than alternative outlets for downloading mass quantities of music, which initially drew me to blogging.
The fact of the matter is, paying for music is over. It’s a choice now; you can pay, or you can download. This has been true since about the mid-1990s, and for the last decade or so I have been doing my best to promote this message, whether by copying and distributing free copies of The Grey Album at school or by finding links to help leak upcoming albums of my favorite artists to the whole world. But if it’s as easy for me to find these links, re-copy them, and paste them here, it must be as easy for you, no? How else would you have found yourself here? I’m done kidding myself that I provide a service to people who want to find music for free. If you don’t know how to find free music online, you simply wouldn’t be here in the first place. Nowadays, you hardly even need to follow certain blogs, oftentimes a simple Google or Google Blog Search with “artist - album (year)” will do the trick (maybe adding a “mediafire” or “megaupload” to the query). In fact, I wonder how much of a community of readers I even really have online; I assume most of the hits are from random people taking links or re-copying album art. On top of this, we have blog and link search engines like Captain Crawl, Ice Rocket, Files Tube, Sordo Music Database, and a bunch of public and private torrent trackers (what.cd, waffles.fm, btjunkie, mininova, demonoid, and so many more). Moreover, the record labels understand this reality all too well, and the smart (independent) ones are working with it, and us, the blogging community, to readjust. I would like to begin working with them as well, because much as it’s nice to have major labels as your enemy, it’s even nicer when indie labels are your friends!
So who am I kidding? I don’t need to provide free albums; that puts me at a liability, and is not the true intention of this blog. I need to focus on finding music that is so good that you will then go illegally download the albums on your own, hype the artists up to your friends, re-post the music on your own blogs, go to their shows, buy their physical releases and become fans for life; thus, we can all do our part in the collective effort of dismantling//remaking the music industry, bit by bit, byte by byte.
