Comments on: Are Music Blogs getting a Raw Deal?

By: Jeff - Bang My Drum Set

Jeff - Bang My Drum Set — Sat, 30 May 2009 04:11:10 +0000

We’re talking about the same thing. I don’t believe in wasting mine or another site owner’s time with spam “Great post” comments.

I comment on something because it’s of interest to me but it’s nice to also get a backlink for my time and effort.

By: Ian

Ian — Sun, 24 May 2009 10:19:38 +0000

Ok, I see. My experience generally is that the time and effort that it would take to try and do that would outweigh the contributions played on my own site. I generally comment on something because I’d like to comment on it, rather than in the hope that someone might check out my own blog…

By: Jeff - Bang My Drum Set

Jeff - Bang My Drum Set — Sat, 23 May 2009 21:41:35 +0000

Hi Ian,

I’m speaking of being finding blogs that help you discover new music that you contribute to by commenting and get a backlink to your own relevant site to help build that community as well.

Jeff

By: Ian

Ian — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:09:27 +0000

Relevant linking Jeff? I don’t think I understand what you mean there. I mainly use it to discover new stuff I may like.

By: Jeff - Bang My Drum Set

Jeff - Bang My Drum Set — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:16:54 +0000

I agree that finding a good aggregator that also gives you some level of backstory/background is a challenge.

Do most of you use them primarily for the relevant linking or for new music discover?

Jeff

By: Carl Morris

Carl Morris — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:54:27 +0000

I think there will always be a place for good writing about music, whether with sound files or not. I for one want to know the backstory and how it fits into the history of music. For me music blogs are a good source of more obscure and forgotten/sidelined music from the past. But Hype Machine's focus on newer music and MP3 blogs exclusively is reflection of popular demand. Ned, I think Hype Machine emphasise newer blogs in search results because of the bandwidth issues Ian mentioned. Very often the earliest links to tracks have already expired by the time you get there. I'd be interested to see how many people are using the Hype Machine favourite feature, where you can track your trusted sources. I imagine there are plenty of people using it who don't actually use feed readers. Good idea on their part. Besides, Ian - I think the savvier bloggers should be rising above Hype Machine by getting together and launching fully fledged group blogs, as Drowned In Sound and Pitchfork Media have fairly successfully done.

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:50:45 +0000

I’d have to agree Ned. It did actually take me sometime to find decent posts to link to that had descriptions which gave a little more information on the tracks. Most had a link to the mp3.

By: Ned Dwyer

Ned Dwyer — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 03:48:07 +0000

The Hype Machine provides a fair bit of traffic but for the more established blogs it usually falls down to less than 30% of total traffic to their site with the majority coming direct to the site and from Google.

The Hype Machine is a great way to aggregate a lot of the better blogs into one place but I feel that they haven’t yet got the most elegant of solutions.

For one the blog to have most recently posted a track is placed first in search results, rather than the blog who “broke” the new track in.

Related to this issue there are a lot of rubbish blogs on the Hype Machine who are posting just an image, a single sentence and a bunch of tracks. I think this detracts from those writing more extensive posts which carry a bit of background and an actual opinion.

Finally the Hype Machine lets the blogs down by not listing posts which do not contain an mp3 and also by not having the ability to search for an artist or key word. Often I go to find out more information about an artist and have to revert to discogs or google because if a Hypem blog doesn’t have the track then Hypem doesn’t know about the artist.

Ned