Are Music Blogs Dying ?

The unedited and rambling thoughts of a music blogger, written whilst taking some time out from constant new music blogging on summer holiday.

In 2008 when Breaking More Waves first started new music blogs were cropping up left right and centre. It seemed that every week another bunch of time rich kids in college or an unemployed man in his bedsit would be unleashing themselves onto the internet having decided that their taste in music or writing or both was exemplary. At the time music blogs were still seen as a threat by the certain parts of the music industry with many blogs posting MP3’s for download that they had no approval to share. At this time Breaking More Waves took a more cautious route and only posted You Tube videos or links to places where music could be heard officially – we’ve always believed in artist control and if an artist doesn’t want a track to be online then we respect that.  As a result we never received any DMCA takedown notices on the blog. 4 years on with the development of Soundcloud we do stream tracks, but only from official sources and have only received 1 takedown notice which was issued in error where a PR company gave us a track to stream exclusively without the knowledge of the American arm of the artists record label knowing.

Now many blogs act in a more responsible way and we believe are viewed by the industry in a favourable light. We’re working with artists not against them, often with no personal gain for ourselves as blog writers except the enjoyment of the music and the network of friends, bloggers, artists and industry types that we develop. Mp3 bloggers are by and large positive in their outlook – they’re not critics as such, but fans of the music they post.

But as music blogs have gained more credibility within the industry, by acting more responsibly, the question we’re asking is are music blogs dying ? There’s evidence to suggest that certainly the traditional MP3 blog is.

Here’s the evidence (for evidence in some cases read ‘not that well thought out theories’)

1.The lack of new start-ups

Many music blogs tend to be temporary. Once those time rich authors find less time available (usually ‘real life’ of work / relationships /children getting in the way) their blogs often come to a close. Yet in the past there has always been some hip new gunslinger of a blog to take over. However we’ve noticed in the last year there have been fewer and fewer new start-ups making a big impression. However maybe this is just us taking our eye off the ball. Having asked for some newly started music blog recommendations on twitter the likes of Alphabet Bands, LostLost Lost, Brapscallions and Beat Pyramid were amongst the relatively young contenders that got thrown up, although arguably none of these have really come to the forefront of the new music blogging scene yet (although they’re certainly in there battling it out).

2.The prevalence of free music elsewhere

Let’s face it, in the past many people hit up blogs for (often unauthorised) free MP3 downloads. With less downloads being made available and streaming services such as Spotify reducing the need for anyone to ever own music, blogs are not such an attractive proposition for many people. The landscape is changing.

3. There are so many ways to discover new music

A recent report by Nielsen of 3,000 online consumer surveys in the US found that 48% of those questioned discovered most new music through radio stations, 10% from friends and 7% from You Tube. The study also found that positive recommendations by a friend also had the biggest influence on what to buy with 54% of those questioned saying that they are more likely to buy music if a friend recommended it compared with 25% going by what is said on chat rooms or blogs. However 25% is still a decent statistic.

Blogs generally cater for a niche audience, so they’re never going to have the same appeal as say daytime Radio 1 in the UK, but it does seem to our eyes that blog influence on the public at large is pretty negligible, although having spoken to a number of record label and media representatives we do believe that blogs still act partly as step 1 influencers on the likes of radio and more traditional media as well as a filter for A&R types in industry. When a band gets a great reaction on the blogs you can guarantee that within a few weeks / months they’ll be picking up interest from others. Blogs are still a cog in the machine, albeit a small one.

4. Decreased traffic / hits

Over the last four years Breaking More Waves has seen a constant increase in visitors. Yet the last 6 months have seen this plateau and fall a little for the first time in our history. Some of this can be attributed to the likes of reduced one off visits from Hype Machine – last year we received a stupidly large amount of traffic from some of our posts on more commercial acts such as Lana Del Rey and Rizzle Kicks, both of whom we were lucky enough to be the first to post high profile MP3 streams of particular tracks from (Video Games and Down With The Trumpets) and this year we haven’t posted anything anywhere near as commercially successful. However we’ve noticed a few other bloggers also remarking that their traffic statistics have dropped (although other established blogs report increases), so it might just be that less people are reading.

We did a bit of digging and punched in some web sites to a few relatively unreliable site analytics tools and we found that many of the so called ‘big blogs’ are also having drops in traffic – and some of them actually aren’t getting anywhere near the number of hits we thought they would be getting. Whilst we’re talking statistics it’s also interesting to note that although the number of hits has dropped, the time spent and average number of pages that visitors look at on Breaking More Waves continues to marginally increase, suggesting that those who do visit enjoy what they get.

5. Buzz blogging

Buzz blogs are killing great blogging. That’s our view. Blogs that repost videos or MP3’s as soon as they are released (often without even listening to the music themselves first) mean that the more traditional blog that likes to give some sort of commentary to what it is posting is often seen as irrelevant and out of date – such is the way the speed of the internet works. We’ve got to a point now where phrases such as ‘sorry I’m so slow to post this’ about a new track that has been online less than 24 hours is being written on blogs. Really ? 24 hours? Too slow? Is that all the attention span music fans have now? Maybe this is part (but not all) of the root cause of why music blogs are dying. There’s no real sense of love, no sense of fandom from buzz blogs authors, it's just here's a song, play it. Blogs shouldn’t have to apologise for being ‘late’ in posting something, especially if they’ve got something interesting to say, possibly even moving the conversation about the song or artist forward.  But, why should anyone care about what someone else has to say about music if blogs are just seen as things that have nothing to say at all?

6. Blogs just aren’t sexy anymore

But then we were never really sexy in the first place. Or were we? Go on, tell us that you still find us desirable. Tell us that we still fulfil your fantasies. Tell us that we still turn you on. Maybe if we dress up in different underwear you'll like us again ? OK, we’ll stop there before we actually give up and write a sex blog instead. Actually that might be quite fun…. Fifty shades of Breaking More Waves perhaps?

So what is the future for music blogging ?

We’ve been asked this question a number of times by various people and our answer is always the same. We have no idea - and anyone who pretends they do is usually found lacking in vision a few years on. But taking a wild stab in the dark we’d say that traditional MP3 blogs are slowly dying. They’re not going to disappear yet and probably won’t vanish fully, but in the same way that old fashioned paper based fanzines have largely disappeared we can imagine a time when as MP3 blogs call it a day and new ones won’t replace them – it seems to be happening a little already. For whatever reason there seems less enthusiasm for music blogging.

However we do believe that blogs that do something different, or that have something interesting to say will win out. If blogs, as a channel of new music discovery die, we believe people will still want to be entertained with opinions, knowledge, personality and humour. We also believe that there are music fans out there who will want to write about their passion in some form, irrespective of the number of people reading and that there are similar minded music fans who will want to read about it. It just might not be in the form it is now. Breaking More Waves started out as a paper fanzine (called Breaking Waves of course) and when the time was right it became a blog. We’re pretty sure that at some point we’ll evolve again, but we’ll still want to talk about our passion. Anyone who has ever been down the pub for a drink with us will know that at some point the conversation will turn to music and this blog is just an extension of that conversation. Seriously if only one person read Breaking More Waves (hi reader) we’d still write it.

The statistics from our own blog give weight to this opinion; some of our most viewed posts are our more discursive articles rather than our standard ‘here’s a song, it’s quite amazing’ type post. It suggests that there’s an audience / community for debate, discussion and conversation about music and that debate will last longer than blogs that promote themselves solely as tastemakers in new music discovery.

The internet is a strange beast. No one knows where things are going 100%. But we’re pretty sure that music blogs in their traditional form are slowly dying. We’d welcome your comments on this via twitter or below.

Updated 23rd August 2012 - The Recommender blog posted a counter view to our own which helps show the other side of the debate. It's worth checking out and then reading our response in the comments section below. Have a look by clicking this link here.