With the decentralization of music came the uprising of music blogging. Websites that catered to different genres and niches helped to fill the gap that was lacking in mainstream press. With content becoming so easily accessible and in demand these days and blogs fast turnaround and passion about music, they are increasingly becoming to go to place for music recommendation, but how well are they doing? The panel titled “The State of Music Blogs in 2010” helped to figure out just that.

The panel ranged from big tastemakers like Jesse Ervin from EMI/Capitol to tiny bloggers like Greg Swan at Perfect Porridge that have yet to make money. In between we had Nicole Poulos at Sideways Media, Tessa Horehled at profitable blog Drive A Faster Car and moderator Nathan Wright.

First the panel discussed the importance of simply keeping your blog updated (Greg compares it to buying a car and needing to feed it gas regularly, you can’t expect it to run otherwise), keeping credibility and its future. Are blogs the new record label? Not necessarily Nicole argues, but rather suggests they’re more likely to take the place of traditional radio and other typical tastemaker outlets. With record stores going out of business, crowdsourcing blogging is the current recommendation platform. Getting passionate people to promote an artist’s music is much more informational than simple thumbs up and down features.

Social networking is key, we know this…but the panelists shared more creative and DIY approaches for bands these days. Greg Swan mentioned band Foxy Shazam took to Chatroulette to stream its album and Nicole mentioned a growing trend of scavenger hunts via Twitter, such as for the band Crash Kings, the first user to get to the box office and quote the given hashtag gets 2 free tickets to the show. Jesse from EMI stated how excited some of his acts were to get involved with these new multimedia endeavors (notably Brian Wilson willingly cramming himself and his band into a cab for a “Black Cab Session”) and agreed it was more about conversing versus pushing content.

Blogs are taking these examples and getting more creative themselves, bloggers like Tessa shared she usually goes straight to artist Twitter pages to get that key personal connection to start a relationship. Blogs that offer unique material, like Breakfast At Smileys (a team of crotchedy old people reviewing new releases) is a great example of helping your site go viral and drive traffic from places you wouldn’t normally be able to reach…or keeping your fans interested in your site by holding contests like at Metal Sucks, hosting “your most metal photos”, along with the various video blog sites growing like Northern Outpost, Dirty Laundry and Black Cab Sessions.

As for monetization, first you have to offer something others don’t. Tessa started off writing in her spare time on a LiveJournal community she created, then expanded to Blogger and then WordPress as her audience grew. She now has 2 servers to handle all of her content and is self-sustainable with using blogads and affiliate marketing with Amazon and Buy.at. Tessa mentioned for traffic boosts she felt it was best to host the MP3s herself so when people search sites like HypeMachine, her blog will show up and people will come visit who never would have known about it in the first place. However all of the panelists also championed the growing trend of embeddable players from streaming sites like Lala, that allow easy (and legal) ways to highlight tracks.

A publicist in the audience brought up an appropriate point about the sometimes strenuous relationship between them and bloggers, especially with hosting MP3s illegally. Tessa and Greg explained their experiences with DCMA notices and how you do have to file counter-claims or take down any illegal tracks or else risk your business. Another point about the relationship between publicists and bloggers is the lag in communication. Nowadays when editorial time is very short and fans expect lightning speed responses to music news and events, the main tie up is in the time lag of getting the right information. Publishers and blogs are sometimes butting heads mainly over getting the right formatting or the track or press release…and even after all this time there are still some kinks to work out.

This new multidimensional and multisensoral world we’re living in expects a lot of content on media and blogs are evolving quite rapidly with the online conscious and filling the demand.

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