How Can Music Blogs Pay The Piper?

A lot of people love music, and some of them love it so much that they blog about it every day. Sometimes, there’s no other way to illustrate your love of a particular tune and you just have to link to an mp3 so that your audience can hear for themselves what it is you’re trying to communicate. But is this piracy, as many observers seem to suggest, or is it something else entirely?

A recent article in the Guardian accuses such music blogs of killing independent artists and labels by giving their music away for free. However, an alternative point of view would be that these same bloggers are an invaluable marketing resource for independent music. In terms of the mechanics of popularity, popular music bloggers have a profound influence over what their social networks choose to listen to; if they are truly passionate about their subject, then others will tend to trust their judgement and will be inclined to take their listening suggestions on board. If you can leverage this audience, then it may well snowball in a way that couldn’t be achieved otherwise. The new-look NMS has a step-by-step guide to how a new band could go about doing just that.

To take a different tack, this article recounts how Rick downloaded a bunch of Peter White songs illegally via a p2p service simply because that was the easiest way of getting them (rather than buying them from a digital download store). However, he did want to make sure that Mr. White got paid for his work as a musical artist, so he tried to make a donation through a variety of well-known channels, with bizarre results…

This Music Technology blog post was published on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
in the digital music category. Please feel free to trackback from your own site.