A very long but interesting article chronicling the demise of many of the obscure music download blogs. Considering that most of you here are frequenters of an obscure mixtape download blog, I thought you'd find the article worthwhile. Read article HERE.
1 comment:
It's true that there has been a dramatic decline in the number of active "obscure music blogs". I think the novelty wore off when people realized that maintaining a website can be a lot of work, especially with sketchy file hosting.
Ultimately, the biggest vulnerability of a music blog is exposure. If you post copyrighted works, using anonymous 3rd party hosting, eventually they will find you. And my hunch is that it also applies to mixes that post playlists with copyrighted works in them.
I think blogging about other people's active/temporary links (a la pipomixes) is a good strategy right now for staying in the game without re-ups becoming a burden. The Mixcrate approach is also a good one, but of course it's TON more work and they might go out of business and disappear because they seem to have a profit-oriented model (not gonna happen).
Another approach is to block Google from listing one's site. That opens up the possibility of self-hosting files. It's a trade-off between exposure and practicality, but let's face it... for most people re-ups is a deal killer.
For me, I feel like the long run of preserving access to mixes/music is the most important thing. I've been thinking about starting a new site that is a bit more "archival" oriented. But all of these vulnerabilities have been on my mind. I would never use anonymous hosting so I guess it will be an underground thing, like last time.
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