If you follow me on Twitter then you may have seen me take part in a music blogging debate that was going down on Thursday afternoon. My $0.57 of input were thus:
So apparently I’ve missed the whole #musicblogging debate, but here’s my $0.57….do it because you enjoy it, not for money or popularity.
And:
Now that this #musicblogging debate is done; tickle fight!
I figured I’d weigh in with a slightly more thought-out response because as it was happening there were about 126 people all talking at once. It was like an improv-jazz after-school club but instead of people getting down with some porn-sax or pithy clarinet solos, they were all just tweeting. At the same time. Naturally a lot was lost in the noise, and whilst I have almost no voice in any kind of music-blogging circle, here’s where I stand regardless.
Do it because you enjoy it, not for money or popularity. If you started a music site or blog to become popular, or to get hits, then that’s fine. But don’t bitch when your only source of virtual income (read hypem) is taken away from you or diminished. People who run this kind of site I can only see lasting maybe a year or so because when the hits go low, they’ll lose any desire to keep it going.
If you started your site to make the monies, then you’ve wasted your time. I’ve only been in this ruthless cutthroat game for less than a year but I can already tell how to make money from it, where to make money from it, how long it’s going to take and how it’ll happen (and I currently spend almost $50 a month to run the site and get $15 back if I’m lucky). It’ll take years, so if you want to make money from a music blog, or doing what we do on these sites, give up and get a job as a journalist or critic.
The Hype Machine recently changed the way their machine works and some people have been raging against that (see what I did there?), me being one of them. It’ll encourage sites to try to be first to post something now and discourage people (the ones who care about hits) from posting something that’s already been posted because they won’t get the hits from it. There’s also less variety on the Popular charts, but I rarely visited that anyway so I don’t really care. Traffic from The Hype Machine is nice, don’t get me wrong, but it took me five months to get accepted onto it and it didn’t change the way I posted to the site. When I started the site I didn’t even know about the traffic it could bring, and even if it doesn’t give me a single hit between now and purple, I don’t really give a shit. I honestly couldn’t care less, because I’m not doing this for the hits or for the money. To me, it’s about the content. It’s about the discovery and subsequent sharing of music.
Sites like We Listen For You or Knox Road or I Guess I’m Floating are doing it right. They all average roughly six or seven posts per week, but when they do post you can guarantee that there’s not only something exquisite being said, but the quality control is unmatched. Constantly good music, well-written posts, and knowledgeable writers. They’ve been doing it for years the same way and it’s why their readers trust them. They don’t ask for money, or complain when the hits don’t come (WLFY isn’t even on hypem), they just do it because they enjoy it. If they post, I listen. Every time.
I’m insanely optimistic about Listen Before You Buy, the future as I see it for the site is extremely bright. I have so many ideas for the site and how to grow, how to connect, how to discover, share, communicate and listen that there’s no way I can fail. My plans are big, and if it costs me $50 a month for the next five years without making a penny back, you better fucking believe I’m gonna do that (and you still won’t see ads on here, I refuse).
One of the greatest things about music is sharing it.. With a site/blog, you don’t get to see someone’s reaction as they hit play on a song and are blown away by a new band that you just posted on your site for the first time, but you know it happens. You know they’ve then told someone else about them and have then gone and bought their music and it’s all down to you sharing it. Nathaniel from IGIF above turned me onto Glasser. I fell in love, bought her vinyls, told a buddy at work about her who in turn also fell in love and told his friends about her, and they probably did the same.
All from a tweet. All from sharing music. All from enjoying something so much that he had to tell someone else about it. And that’s why we do this, to spread the word about good music in a piss stream of media that’s otherwise dominated by frozen, pre-packaged meals of factory-made shite.
Just share the music you like, and enjoy doing it.
If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
I’m guessing if you’re still on the page at this point it’s because of that picture up there, right? Yeah me too.
