Curses! I’ve been trying for hours now to post links to some mp3s I’ve uploaded to Xdrive (recommended to me by the Hype Machine) but so far I’m not having much success.  However, once I manage to do it I’ll be a fully fledged music blogger.  And, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility…

Obviously, posting songs for free download when an artist wants people to pay for them isn’t really doing anybody any favours.  But yet there seems to be quite a community of music bloggers who do just that, and are often encouraged by the artists themselves.  For a new/small band the publicity can be a great help, and the blogs themselves can be a convenient go-to point for anyone on the prowl for obscure new bands to adore.  A pretty lage proportion of the new music I’ve discovered lately has come from music blogs, and as an “artist” myself I’m all in favour of submitting “promotional release” mp3s to blogs; at the level I find myself at, the exposure gained from being written about on a blog far outweighs the loss of revenue from a few sneaky downloads.

But clouds are gathering on the horizon, and it appears that there’s a growing atmosphere of resentment between the blogosphere and the major record labels.  I’ll let you read all about it at the Song, by Toad site, as he seems to have taken the matter to heart, but basically Columbia have started shaking their fist at Google, who have finally shown their true colours (the spineless b*st*rds) by obediently acquiescing to the demands of the label and deleting “offending” blog posts (and destroying legitimate intellectual property in the process).

More news on this will be forthcoming, but this post is getting a little long and ranty so I’d better put a stop to it right away.  Stay tuned, folks…