Blog Profile

The concept of “blogging” about music and the music industry has long existed – the fans as well as the artists ALWAYS have something to say, and ALWAYS find a way to make their voice heard. The boom of blog hosting sites like Tumblr, WordPress and Blogspot has spawned countless blogs dedicated to music, the industry and god knows how many artist fan pages (“stalker pages,” dare I say?).

In the past decade a blog and music news site that has gained momentum and is now considered the go-to source for the latest alternative music news is AbsolutePunk.net. It is a website that in itself is an example of the new media frontier in the music industry, where the voice of bloggers are just as important as those of the slightly more prestigious staff members.

In addition to posting breaking music news and album reviews, AbsolutePunk.net also hosts user blogs and interactive forums, serving as an extensive online community for discussions of the latest on-goings in music. Jason Tate, the founder of AP.net, is a regular blogger, posting frequent and always opinionated blogs about recent album releases as well as his thoughts on the state of the current music industry. Tate often blogs about his “First Impressions” on advances that he, as a music journalist, gets a first listen to before the music reaches the masses. Many of his posts are also designed to spark discussion within the whole congregation of bloggers and users on the site. Earlier this summer, during the heated discussions about the use of auto-tune, Tate posted a blog sharing his thoughts on the matter and received many replies from users with their opinions on the subject.

What is often more interesting than Tate’s actual blogs are the user discussions in the forums. Tate’s post about auto-tune stemmed from him seeing a video in a general thread that he re-blogged. News items like “Death Cab For Cutie vs. Auto-Tune” are often triggers to what evolve to become extensive forum discussions among hundreds of users.

The power and influence of a site like AbsolutePunk.net can be demonstrated through its ability to generate incredible online buzz, both positive and negative. With the rising popularity of the subgenre “crunkcore,” which includes artists like 3OH!3 and brokeNCYDE, an incredible backlash was unleashed on the site, with any news post about brokeNCYDE garnering at least a couple hundred of responses, most extremely, and harshly, negative. The active user community on the site includes both opinion leaders and the average Joe Blow, making it very interesting to see the dialogues that occur in these blog forums.

Absolutepunk.net is ranked 9,404 by technorati.com, and has an estimated 115,200 unique visitors each month, according to Quantcast.com. Tate’s 1,828 blogs collectively have over 900,000 views – regardless of people's opinion on his blogs, he is at least a voice that people care enough to hear.

My blog, unlike AbsolutePunk.net, will be 100% blog. The topics I talk about will stem from the hot topics that are being discussed on sites like AP.net. If the people out there in cyberspace are talking about it, so will I. I will also attempt to go more in-depth into these issues, doing additional research to gain a comprehensive overview and different perspectives of the various subject matter.