Elbows Music Blog Community

i dont link to any sites that just post full albums and in order to stay on the good side of the record industry I rarely commercially available tracks with prior consent.

Posting commercially available tracks goes against my vision of what music blogs are for and although "sharing" the next bands single will increase your visitors I think it's a really bad thing in the long run.

If there was a music blogger constitution what be include?

I think "No full albums." is a given.

So I'm totally against posting material people can just buy, the majority of the stuff I post can be download from the bands myspace/ websites.

I don't see a problem with live recordings being posted because I don't think in any circumstance download live recording would stop anyone buying that artists Cd, if anything it'll increase the likelihood.

I try to promote independant bands/labels as much as possible and I always try to link to cds/ products so that the bands we all love can keep making music.

"I don't upload the material" is a terrible excuse, people should be responsible about what the post.

I agree with the above comments. I don't post or download full albums. I always try to include a link to buy the albums, and the artist's site or tour dates if I can find them. I also try to avoid posting new popular music, both for my own protection against lawsuits and mostly because they don't need the publicity. I started my blog to share music that I like and encourage people to support artists that they probably wouldn't hear of otherwise, so posting stuff they hear on the radio defeats the purpose. Without the artists, we wouldn't have any music to post about.

An old post by Mystery and Misery just about sums it up: http://www.mysteryandmisery.com/article/330/moistworks-mp3-blogger-coming-under-fire

That said, I try to do my part in this and not include blogs that post complete CDs on the Hype Machine.

It's a precarious balance, but seems like bloggers (if you can even call them that) from outside the US pay even less regards to it: muchmusic.net is a good example of fine Chinese people posting full albums.

For my part, I only post authorized downloads. In the year that I've been running Knobtweakers, I've only had one request to pull a track, and that was because the artist didn't have permission to make the track available from his record label, and he got himself into a little bit of hot water.

Most of the music I post has a creative commons license -- but that isn't something that all MP3 blogs might be able to duplicate. Most (cc) material right now is electronic. If that isn't where you're interests lie, you're probably in a more difficult spot than I am.

I'm not terribly familiar with "sharing sites" as you use the term here. There are a few big sites in Asia that send me a lot of traffic, which are obviously just aggregating links to MP3s, whether they're genuinely free or unauthorized downloads. Is that an example of what you mean?

Yeh - it can be exploitative but every track I read about/download and then love on your blog it would not have otherwise heard about - it's not a lost sale for the artist - promoting the purchases is crucial in my opinion.

The good thing is more and more artists are making mp3's available and I haven't yet had an artist say no to me uploading one of their tracks when I ask if they didn't previously have any material to download.

It certainly means that I do not endorse or encourage people to read Said the Gramophone in that way, and is in fact the reason that I don't link to Hype Machine or elbo.ws on our website, despite the fact that both sites' intentions, design and owners are good. (And despite the fact that I use sites like that when researching what others have said about a given act.)

gosh, would you look at that!

elbo.ws will be added forthwith

oh. then I stand corrected.

to take a bit of a stance from the other side...

I run a label, a few of you have posted stuff from our artists. What you are doing is something incredible and Sean nails it on the head above..."i like blogs that introduce me to beautiful music i wouldn't have otherwise heard, or who present it in a context that lets me learn about or love it in a new way. "

and as takeyourmedicine said, "promoting the purchases is crucial.."

for our label, you guys have made all the difference, we've been doing this for a few years, but were really having difficulty getting our music out there for people to hear....distributors weren't giving us the time of day because we didn't have any huge-selling albums (snake eating its tail), some magazines wouldn't cover us because we weren't affilitiated with a major or major indie, or because we had all new artists, or because we didn't have distribution (snake eating its midsection), the itunes music store would never get back to us and we couldn't get our artists' booking agents because regardless of the actual quality of the music or live show, they were looking for someone to "draw crowds"; someone who already had a lot of press and had sold a lot of records (snake actually attempting to fit its jaw around its own head)....

but you guys have given us a chance, and just listened...the whole point of music in the first place, right? and then you shared that with other people...and then it went outwards from there...

now, we've got the print mags playing catch-up (just got a recommended feature in Spin and supposedly an upcoming something in Mojo), we had enough positive comments floating around to get the attention of a digital distributor who got us added to the iTunes Music Store, and now we've established relationships with a few great distributors who are really actively behind what we are doing....

yes, i would generally prefer if blogs used the "officially-sanctioned" mp3s from each record, but at the end of the day, it's not a big deal, because we are humbled at our inclusion in the first place....and i'm cool with it, as long as they take the little bit of time to try to actually help the artist and label out (with purchase here or links or other types of info)....

linking to zips of the entire album? well, i think we can all agree...that's just f-ed up.

Well the way i see it, the bigger the blogs get, more and more of the major record labels are goin to go about ways to wine and dine the bloggers to get them to post there stuff, its all about exposure anyway. WIth radio suckin it up in the way only radio can, blogs are becoming/are a very vital way to reach consumers, as we all know smaller labels have already adopted this and made it work for them. That being said all this can very easily be corrupted, or probably shut down because its just something they can't control with thier laywers.

The truth is, all that choose to write blog walk a very fine line, and some rules (common sense stuff, like not posting an entire album) should be laid down.

neutrality? nonsense. i get emailed a faceless email by a new band with a couple mp3s, and even if i don't post about it, it's all but guaranteed that someone else will. when a major release comes out, if it's in the genre that a blog talks about, what are the chances that a given blog will totally ignore the release if they don't like it?

it doesn't seem to me that the musicblog community is any less likely than the print press to talk about whatever the PRs are pushing. in our case, however, there just happen to be a lot of smaller PRs (ie, often independent bands) doing the press calls. and admittedly the impact is currently -less- than in print, basically because most PRs aren't offering up the same calibre of swag. but that's changed a ton in the past year.

yeh thats quite true about being upfront as marathonpack says and I can easily see a lot of blogs posting about fewer independant bands as the "swag" - as Sean STG says - increases.

Obviously some will take the bait - the only thing I can see myself doing is continuing to post about bands I like not the CD's I get sent. The majority of the bands I post about are not successful. I expect it to stay this way.

There is a tempetation to post a track because you know you'll get traffic from - even if you don't really like it - but reading what everyone has been writing on this community has made me think that in the long run - traffic means nothing, is nice but in my eys consistant quality wins over popular-quantity. If that makes any sense at all.

I never post full albums. I might post oodles of songs in one single post to tide people over until I get back from vacation. That's the only time. My number one rule is that I neverever blog about a band that emails me first because it usually means they've already been blogged about to death and pushed down everyone's throats from all angles. It's the ones that don't have publicists and PR people that interest me nowadays. The DIY ones.

I think it's awesome that many of you feel that way about the promo stuff you get in the mail. This is exactly why I and many others love mp3 blogs.

If mp3 blogs would only post stuff that comes in the mail, then it'd be evident they are turning into Traditional Music Publications, which operate on the same basis.