Music Blogs - friend or foe? · Nov 13, 02:56 PM

Music blogs are playing an increasingly significant role in both music promotion and illegal file sharing. For many they are now the main way to find new music and for labels, they can be a great way to build buff hype about your latest release. It is important to realise that there are two distinctly different types of blogs out there. There are those intended to promote music and there are those more geared towards self promotion.

Two very different animals

A blogger might speak to the label then post a single track as a 128kbps MP3 and talk about the release with info on where to buy it. Another blog might post up 320kbps MP3s of every track on the release for anyone to have gratis. I even recently heard about a blog that posted the entire output of a particular label to download free from their blog. Every track the label had ever released was available as a high quality download! Is this a fan trying to promote the music they love or is it someone trying to boost the popularity of their precious blog?

If you are going to use the blogging revolution to your advantage, you need to find the blogs that are going to help your sales. Find the ones that post about the kind of music you are releasing and check them out. Are they being ethical with the way they post or are they likely to spread your pre-release music all over the net? Build a list. Email the good ones. Get them on your promo list.

Hypemachine is a popular blog aggregator which pulls together posts from hundreds of music blogs. They also publish a list of the most popular ones. Elbo.ws is another aggregator with a big list of blogs (although not in order of popularity). These lists are a good place to start in building your blog promo list.

Another thing to watch out for

Some of these bloggers are now working in teams. One blog will post tracks 1, 3 and 5 off an LP. Another will post 2, 6 and 7 and yet another will post 4, 8 and 9 so in the end, the whole LP is available through the aggregator sites like Hypem and Elbo. This is a cheeky tactic because it means each of the blogs can pull out their ethical blogging card but in truth, there’s a plot going on to make your release available for free. Beware. A possible way to stop this happening is to decide which tracks are going to be promo’d and just service those to the blogs. If you use a promo service like FATdrop, you can choose which of the tracks are available as stream only and which are available to download. That means the bloggers can hear the whole release and form their opinions, but it won’t give them the ability to share the whole thing.

— Alex FATdrop

Comments

Add a comment