Music Blogging’s “Hack” Quotient To Increase Exponentially

noah | March 20, 2008 3:45 am
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Do you want to enter the lucrative world of music blogging? Do you lack the ability to put together sentences, dig through piles of publicist e-mails, surf the hype/backlash wave, and actually take the time to hit “publish” once you’ve slogged through the previous steps? Well, fret no more! Someone has put together a guide to putting together your own MP3 blog that will take up no more than 10 minutes of your time thanks to some “clever” use of the music-tracking site last.fm, the apparently-still-around Yahoo! Pipes, the microblog application Tumblr, and, of course, deeplinking content that other people have already posted. You’ll never have to look at the gaping yawn of a “Compose New Entry” page again!

1. Visit My MP3 Tumblelog page on Yahoo! Pipes 2. Enter your Last.fm user name and click “Run Pipe”. If no tracks appear, that means the tool was unable to find matching MP3’s from the web. You need to wait until some appear in order to post them to Tumblr. 3. Once some tracks appear in Pipes, select “More Options > Get as RSS” and copy the RSS URL. 4. Login to your new Tumblr account and select “Account > Feeds” from the tab at the top of the page. 5. Add the Pipes RSS feed as “links with summaries” to start importing your music. 6. Copy the embed code from section “B” on the Yahoo! Media Player page and paste that line of code into the “description” field on your new Tumblr’s theme Customize page. 7. There is no step 7. You’re done!

Last.fm will track your listening habits. Pipes will find MP3’s from the web matching the new songs you listen to. Tumblr will import the songs. People can play the songs on your page using the Yahoo! Media Player. The only issue I’ve noticed is that the sites hosting the MP3’s might eventually remove the MP3 file that your site links to. Fortunately, the Yahoo! Media Player handles this gracefully. If you try to play a MP3 that’s no longer available, the player will skip to the next song after a few seconds.

Some enterprising guy has already figured out a way to monetize this sucker! And yes, I used the word “monetize” because its ickiness is pretty appropriate to this whole enterprise.

It’s genius is how it turns the (mostly) passive activity of listening to music into a content creating endeavor (albeit, an automated endeavor). The newest version of the Yahoo player even has a ‘buy’ button, that lets you link in your own Amazon affiliate code. …

So every time someone buys a track after listening to it on my Tumblr blog, I get something like a nice shiny nickle. In theory, this means one could get paid to listen to music – truly my dream job. All I need is more traffic, and better taste in music ;)

Passive endeavors meet passive endeavors! Just think, this means that there will be more music blogs out there, only this time, instead of the delusion that they’re “tastemaking”–which at least implies something in the way of expended effort–they’ll sit around dreaming about the riches they’ll make from just listening to music, which, as we all know, is a very lucrative enterprise. Here’s hoping that the blogger above isn’t expecting much more than “nickles” to start rolling his way.

How To Make Your Own Music Site In 10 Minutes [joelaz.com] Music Blogs Made Easy [Mixed Content]