About a year ago, Anthony Volodkin, a 20-year-old student at New York’s Hunter College and a moonlighting IT consultant, unveiled The Hype Machine, which aggregates hundreds of the best blogs and makes their songs easily searchable. Elbows is another popular aggregator. The songs may be posted for “sampling” purposes, but spend an afternoon searching for new titles, and you could easily cobble together entire new albums and fill a decent chunk of hard-drive space with all kinds of music you never knew you needed.
Add in the effects of increasingly popular hosting services like YouSendIt and EZarchive, which allow fans in online music groups to post files — sometimes zipped folders containing dozens of songs at a time — and a new paradigm seems to have arrived: an aboveground way to get loads of free music and video. Suddenly, the need for signing on to file-sharing networks has diminished.
Volodkin says he invented The Hype Machine, which updates every hour with new posts from across the blogosphere, simply to make it easy for people to listen to this stuff. “To actually go through and check out every single page and every song that people have up is a lot more difficult and time-consuming. A lot of people might not be able to do that, and they’ll miss out on a lot of great music.”
He also doesn’t think he’s helping facilitate the “stealing” of music. Shawn Fanning he ain’t. “Things like Napster or KaZaA — it was focused on, ‘Okay, let’s look for the artist, let’s download everything they have by the artist, complete CDs, just download media without any thought of it.’ In this case, I’m not sure how many people actually take the trouble to go through and download [a lot of] music. Oftentimes, in my case, at least, I have people buying things through the iTunes links.”
Volodkin prides himself on being a good citizen by linking only to blogs that live up to his standards. “Unfortunately, I think that some people do start mp3 blogs to gather advertising revenue, and to do some things [that are] really unethical. They post copyrighted content to just gather visitors and get hits. Most of those blogs I don’t include in The Hype Machine. I’ve heard also of people posting complete CDs, which I find really despicable, because that goes against everything that mp3 blogs are about.”
Moreover, he argues, blogs, while offering almost limitless free music, help sell songs in many cases. For one thing, they link directly to retailers. This writer, for one, headed directly to eMusic to buy the new Robert Pollard album after hearing a few tracks from blogs. And while it’s doubtful that many label owners will go on record as embracing blogs wholeheartedly — at least not yet — the fact that the majors haven’t gone after them in any significant way (one blog, 45RPM, was served with a cease-and-desist from the RIAA for hosting unreleased Strokes tracks last November) and the fact that at least a few of them are testing the waters suggest that they see potential in them.
