Ripped by Greg Kot

Author:Greg Kot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pitchfork was certainly the loudest voice on the Net when it came to music journalism, but it certainly wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of e-zines and blogs began to shape the dialogue about underground music in the years immediately following the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing. Audio blogs not only talked up new bands but allowed readers to hear them by posting MP3 files. These sites were instrumental in building an audience for electro-pop producers Junior Boys, Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., and the Nordic pop singer Annie, among others.

“When I started, we had no competition,” Schreiber says. “People would surf the Web for Fugazi, and we’d be one of the few results. Now it seems like everyone has a blog. Starting a website like this is a huge endeavor, and there isn’t a lot of quick payoff. If I were starting over, I’d certainly start a blog instead of a Web zine.”

By 2007, more than 25 million blogs covering a range of topics were in operation. The Hype Machine, a website devoted to chronicling MP3 blog activity, listed more than eighteen hundred blogs covering music in 2008. No music was too obscure; each genre had its go-to site, from African pop (bennloxo.com) to Polish jazz (polish jazz.com).

This was a boon for indie labels trying to reach a specific audience. “Traditional places for advertising and marketing have shrunk for a label of our size,” says Merge cofounder Mac MacCaughan. “In the early nineties, we were getting videos played on MTV specialty programs like 120 Minutes once or twice and getting some coverage in traditional print media. But the column inches are growing less and less for the type of [underground] music we work with. We’re getting priced out and inched out by bigger labels. So blogs, Internet forums, and our own website are having a democratizing effect. It’s more niche-driven, but it gives people in our niche a place to go to find out about it.”

One of the more respected voices in the morass of Internet bloggers was Matthew Perpetua, an indie-pop fanatic who began running fluxblog.org in 2002 out of his parents’ home in Cold Spring, New York, after graduating from the Parsons School of Design. He was among the first bloggers to make MP3 files available on his site so that his readers could hear for themselves the music he championed, an innovation made possible by the wider availability of broadband cable service and faster Internet connections.

“A lot of the stuff I post is in this big gray area legally, but I only post stuff I love and I’ve never had a cease and desist [order from a record label or artist manager],” Perpetua says. “The overwhelming majority of people are positive about it, because of the ripple effect something like this creates: fans start talking about music, and artists can get record deals because of a song being heard by the right people on the Internet.”

By 2007, Perpetua’s site was drawing two hundred thousand visitors a month, up from fifteen thousand in 2005.

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