MP3 Blogs

The Morning News has gathered six of its favorite mp3 bloggers to a roundtable chat "to find out what makes them tick, what problems they face, and what, exactly, the record companies should do next."

Mp3 blogs (or audio blogs or music blogs) are the newest frontier in online music-sharing—a groundswell has appeared in the last year of people posting mp3 files of songs they love, free of charge on personal web sites (but only available for a short period of time), and usually annotated with biographical and contextual notes about the artist and the music. The phenomenon has been noticed but only barely, and the recording industry, if wise to the trend, isn’t protesting.

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David: "I try to link to legal downloads offered by the artists, or live shows that are public domain.
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Sean: If people like a song, I hope that they will buy the record or attend the show. Many, many do. I think musicians (and even labels) are beginning to understand that sampling precedes purchase, that it's a way to learn about and fall in love with music. Most mp3 blogs aren't trying to sabotage artists and record companies—to "give away songs for free"—but rather to support them, to applaud them, to make grassroots connections between good songs and the people who will enjoy (and then buy) them.
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John: ...when I say I might put up some music. "Oh, you shouldn’t do that; that's stealing music!" The recent RIAA lawsuits have definitely left a "drugs are bad" commonsense bitter aftertaste on the average Joe. We're going to eventually have to deprogram this attitude. I definitely feel a responsibility to the musicians, hence my self-imposed dictum that I won’t post anything that’s commercially available without a link to a place where you can buy it. ...

The MP3Blogs Aggregator

RSS feed of MP3 blogs

Reuters.com on mp3blogs: "In an attempt to dodge lawsuits, most MP3 blogs have disclaimers that their music is for "sampling purposes only," and they urge people to buy the artists' music."

From a policy perspective, one would hope that the RIAA would take little interest in policing mp3 blogs as they have the file sharing networks.

MP3 blogs are run by consumers and not competitors. The sites are non-commercial (the ones run by the editors above do not even employ google adsense). They promote music for the benefit of both the artists and the labels (in fact they have been contacted by labels to promote their artists). Studies indicate that sampling most likely precedes sales. Unlike anonymous file sharing networks that share samples of every song by an artist for an indefinite period; the editors of mp3 blogs operate within a frameowrk of responsibility - offering digital downloads for a limited time while promoting the puchase of the artist's works.

From the RIAA's current legal perspective, distribution of copyrighted works, even under this model of responsibility, could be deemed infringement and thus subject to damage awards. We await their reaction and hope that it's more tempered than what we've seen from them in the past.

follow-up: NYT: Warner's Tryst With Bloggers Hits Sour Note

In the week after the song was posted on Music for Robots, a message board on the site attracted some thoughtful commentary on Warner's move. But a few comments, posted under several different names, stood out because they looked like something one might read on a teen-pop fan site.
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A check of site records by Mr. Willett revealed that all four of the suspect comments had been posted from the same Internet Protocol address, indicating that they came from the same computer or from a computer within the same company. That address was also the source of two e-mail messages that Ms. Bechtel sent to a reporter, as well as the original messages sent to the bloggers.