Recently I came across this article on The Economist “Ever-increasing choice was supposed to mean the end of the blockbuster. It has had the opposite effect.“
With all the year end list flurry that happens mid to late December still on my mind there was a particular paragraph and theory that resonated with me:
In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
What this implies is that consuming more media leads you to be more critical of each piece which in turn leads you to enjoy ‘hits’ less and less over time. If someone was to listen to and rate 1,000 albums in a year you would assume that this person would not likely prefer hit records.
Christopher R. Weingarten, he of @1000TimesYes twitter fame, did just that. In 2009 he listened to and ‘reviewed’ (via 140char tweet) 1,000 albums. His number one? Green Day. This is not to say that an album cannot be both a critical and popular hit but one would expect that if a hit record was actually that good there would be some sort of critical consensus.
Metacritic shows Green Day’s 20th Century Breakdown has an average critical score of 70. Rolling Stone, who provided the highest score for the album, called it the 5th best album of the year.
Does listening to more music make you a better critic? The function of a critic is to discern value and provide reasoned analysis. It would seem then that critical analysis would lead to somewhat of a consensus within your area of interest (leaving room for personal taste and experiences that have influenced preference).
Consuming more, which may make you a great fan, does not necessarily lead to higher standards or to being a better critic.
Where is livingears. blogspot. com? #Blogocide2k10
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010BlogDeath
Blogger deleted my blog located at livingears.blogspot.com on Monday. I received the following email after it had been deleted:
We’d like to inform you that we’ve received another complaint regarding your blog (http://livingears.blogspot.com/). Upon review of your account, we’ve noted that your blog has repeatedly violated Blogger’s Terms of Service (http://www.blogger.com/terms.g). Given that we’ve provided you with several warnings of these violations and advised you of our policy towards repeat infringers, we’ve been forced to remove your blog.
Thank you for your understanding.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
This has been picked up on by a few outlets as multiple blogs seem to have been deleted at the same time.
There is word that Google has a new policy which is to just hit delete on blogs instead of sending a warning if you post an infringing mp3. This article in the LA Weekly has a blogger discussing the same feeling I have towards blogging, the RIAA and copyright infringement.
While much of what I post here is emailed to me, for larger acts such as The xx it can be difficult to determine which tracks are fair game to post. Often I take my queues from larger sites like Stereogum, Fader or Pitchfork. If they have it up for download the artist must be good with that, right? Last year I posted a newly released mp3 from The Twilight Sad which was available on both Stereogum and Pitchfork. A week later Blogger had deleted the post.
There is a record kept of DMCA notices against individual sites. Here is the list of notices against my former site.
One problem with these notices is that they do not mention infringing files by name. When I post the playlist from Scene Not Heard and link to a couple of tracks, if I receive a DMCA notice, how can you tell which file is to be deleted? The bigger problem with these notices is that there is no burden of proof. Anyone can submit one of these DMAC notices against any site. So, say I had a vendetta against other blogs out there all I would need to do is claim that they were violating copyright. I don’t have to hold the copyright, I just have to mention the supposed violation. Even if artists/labels want music out there anyone can get it pulled.
Though I have no proof, I believe Web Sherriff may be doing just this. Most of the notices against my site came from London which is home to the company. Looking at the list of sites in these notices there seems to be no single identifying factor. I would expect to find the same band, song or label but these notices look to be long lists of blogs posting mp3s of any sort.
There really should be some sort of clearing house for music that artists want shared. If there was a database where artists and labels could upload tracks (similar to what soundcloud is doing), and the presence of files in this database meant sharing was encouraged, this would be a much clearer process. Even still, there needs to be some burden of proof. Without that this process never gets better. Blogging is not supposed to be a cat and mouse game of outsmarting ‘the man.’ We blog because we are passionate about music and want to share our findings and new favorites with anyone willing to listen.
When I initially started a blog I spent time researching which service I was going to use to host my blog. Because my favorite blogs at the time (myoldkentuckyblog and gorillavsbear) were both built on Blogger, I decided to go with Blogger as well. I figured they knew something I didn’t. Don’t do that. My advice to those out there interested in creating a music blog: go with WordPress over Blogger.
**UPDATES & Additional Coverage**
Tags: #musicblogocide2k10, Commentary
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