We Haven’t Had A Post About Music Bloggers In A Long, Long Time

noah | September 17, 2007 3:10 am

This morning I read a lengthy, waaahmbulance-chasing post by Greg Katz, a blogger in Los Angeles who was set to go see electropop revivalist Calvin Harris (whose video for the awesome “Acceptable in the ’80s” is above), and who was on the guest list for the show. As it turned out, Katz got bumped from the list at the last minute, which peeved him because he’d “blogged and spun [Harris’ album I Created] Disco relentlessly” and been “doing what [he] could to repay Calvin and Sneak Attack in blog posts and DJ spins” for the list spot. Lengthy blogorrhea ensued, with Katz going on and on about how he was disappointed, how he thought he’d have been treated better if he wrote for print, etc., etc. Which, you know, fine, losing a guest-list spot at the last minute stinks, but I don’t think there’s a writer out there–print, online, skywriting, whatever–who it hasn’t happened to at least once in their career.

Anyway, the recently resurgent Gerard Vs. Bear chewed Katz out for his sense of blogger entitlement (and honestly, his whole “I wanted to give back, so I gave the PR people and the artist extra blog love” is icky on a Jann-reviewing-Mick level), but what struck me about the post is how it was reflective of the new culture of writing about music, and how the lines are blurring between fans, members of the “press,” and street-teamers by the second.

The bulk of my job involves refreshing my RSS feed 80 times an hour, and there have been many times recently where I’ve felt like the pool of people who were writing about certain (indie-skewing, it should be noted) records and the pool of people who were said records’ target audience have overlapped in a really big way; this has also helped, in my opinion, accelerate the rise of leak culture, and people trying to get their hands on albums as soon as they’ve been shipped out to journalists under the idea that they are “going to write about the bands,” whether on their blogs or on Web sites they contribute to or on message boards. And I think that confusion results in, well, blogger entitlement–the attitude being “I support the scene by writing about your artists, therefore you should support me by giving me free albums/concert tickets/etc.”

This is all made even more complex by the fact that a lot of PR companies out there want bloggers to write about their artists–at least, if the correlations between my inbox and the elbo.ws charts are any indication–because they’re somewhat effective at grass-roots buzz, and are often helpful when filling up the one-sheets with positive quotes about artists. (Although I’d argue that blogs are often better at starting backlashes than sparking interest at this point, but that’s a subject for another post.) But I’m starting to wonder if this model is going to crack under its sheer weight; after all, the music-blog world is pretty insular and low-trafficked, and I’d venture a guess that a good chunk of people reading indie blogs and Web sites are also writing their own, and showing up at the same shows, particularly in industry-heavy cities like New York and Los Angeles (sometimes when I’m browsing my RSS reader, I get the sense that there are certain Mercury Lounge shows where the entire crowd is guestlisted/there to “cover it” for some Web site or another). At what point does music blogging stop being a conversation and start becoming a, well, circle jerk? Incidents like this make me wonder if things aren’t already sliding toward that point.

(Also, couldn’t Katz have just e-mailed the PR person and asked to buy a ticket through them? If you really want to see a show that badly, eight bucks shouldn’t be that make-or-break. Not to assume about anyone’s finances, but come on.)

Why I am not going to Calvin Harris tonight [The Rawking Refuses To Stop!]