Let Music Blogs Be For Musicians

        Historically speaking, there is a separation between musicians and music bloggers.  Musicians continue to espouse anti-modernist, anti-technology attitudes across genres.  Why?  Probably because they have a "romantic" self-identity that does not allow for the enthusiastic embracing of new technologies.  Probably also because they tend to have less access to those technologies.  The point here is that any broad survey of the music blog world reveals that artists rarely, if ever run a continuing "successful" music blog.  I refer to success wholly as it is defined within the context of music blogs, i.e. people read the posts and the artists talked about are later talked about by other blogs.
      Meanwhile, as I noted here yesterday, music blogs are written by people very different then the artists that they write about on their music blogs.
     If you can imagine a proto-music blog show, say Animal Collective playing Brooklyn in 2003, you've got your music bloggers, who will probably do a brief write-up on their live journal, or maybe post a listing on a bbs.  You've got you musicians, who are watching and thinking about how awesome Animal Collective is, and those are two separate groups.
    I think that division is kind of the "original sin" of music blogs.  You back to 2003: Why shouldn't the musicians be the ones blogging about how great the animal collective show is, or posting an mp3?  Well, they probably just didn't have their shit together and access to a computer.
   If you fast forward 2009, and ask yourself the same question of any rock and roll show the answer has changed.  Now the answer is "because it's not the place of the musicians" or "non-musicians will resent the move, provoking a back lash among the enthusiast fan base."
   In response, I would like to make two brief arguments:
1.  The growth of the more infrequent music blog, one that posts once or twice a week rather then multi time daily, favors the artist as blogger.
2.  The crystallization of the music blog hierarchy makes it very easy for new blogs to make an immediate impact, ie MBV or Stereogum posts your mp3 after seeing it on their rss feed, or another "feeder" blog.
    Why do musicians put up with the bullshit of letting music bloggers mediate the relationship with their fans?  I guess, in some sense, it's viewed as a "given" or, simply as being a preferable alternative to artist music blogs.  Maybe it's because musicians aren't smart enough to figure out how to write a decent music blog, or not disciplined nough. 
   But to me, music writers are like Brahmans in ancient India, who convinced the rest of the society that they were the only people who could relate to their gods.  Kings needed Brahmans to tell them what to do.  There were struggles, sure, but the Brahmans really did convince everyone that they were necessary for the practice of religion.  Music writers have done that to artists "Hey- you need someone else to interpret your music to fans."  Um: I don't think so.
   Also, this is all in the category of "ways participants are playing different roles and adopting several roles in an attempt to function as professionals in the music industry."  That's a larger topic, of which this is a smaller subject.  So I say, let music blogs be for the musicians.

Live Journal, BBSes & Music Blogs

There are two pre-music blog phenomenons that form a basis for the culture of music blogging.  Both these phenomenons occurred in the period immediately before the music blog emerged, and both are distinct, historical  occurrences in the history of music and internet culture.

1.  Live Journal

Did you ever keep a 'live journal.'  Boy, I sure didn't. When live journal was popular, I didn't even know what a blog was.  Live Journal is more private, and not very oriented towards the public, but there was def. a community there, and specifically, a community, centered in nyc, of live journalers who were into indie rock.  Stereogum evolved out of this scene, maybe Brooklyn Vegan???  But the point is just that music blogs partially evolved out of the Live Journal community mostly in nyc, though w/ national participants, too.

2.  BBSes

Ok, so basically the music blog is pairing these live journal types with an existing community of bbs music nerds.  BBSers are basically what you call commenter's.

3.  Conclusion

Music blogs, at their heart, represent a collaboration between live journalists who moved from private to public posting, coupled with bbsers, who discussed related music on line in a pre-blog format.   One note is that if you look at the actual musical taste of these two groups there is a conflict: live journalists are stereotypically "Indie" while the bbs scene is def. more "nuggets""garage""punk," all american rock sub genres pretty much.