Once upon a blog, when music culture was not at the mercy of online attention and djs once physically gathered at record shops, “wax was in.” The standard record outlet would release a weekly rotation of newly shipped music and in-house selected vinyl, dropped into the record-bins for browsing and listening, a perfect excuse for an avid music lover to leave the house for the day.
These shops, served as a forum of neutrality to niche music-heads and genre collectors — a gateway to expanding and exploring new music tastes alongside others. Friendships once forged at the listening booths, music swaps carried out with the community, even requesting shop owners to source a record, having it set aside the following with your name on it; nirvana for a starving record crate. An era (looking back,) quite golden, pushed into obscurity over the invention of the MP3, coupled with the internet. A toxic cocktail was brewing in the eyes of a physical-medium driven industry.
The early-internet: web 2.0, “the dot com bubble”; whatever you want to call it, was an “adjustment era,” musically and technologically. Newly minted social media websites of the mid-2000’s came roaring, and a loud-cry demand for streaming music became evident as cell-phones evolved into pocket computers. The focus of music overall, took a step-back from the physical domain, and became more about speed and delivery online. Eventually a war in loudness broke out when studio-engineers pushed the limits of digital audio and started to get bored.
Writers took the internet as their new “pen and paper”, blogging was the perfect blend of website ownership, journaling and self-publishing. The print industry single-handedly contributed to the visual language and evolution “the internet”, why does it look like a newspaper and magazine met a visual-programmer in a computer lab. Inventive marketing became the currency, and record labels got busy when they noticed this trend. Computers got cheaper, and the price-of-entry to online marketing came alike. Music magazines shifted to quicker media while social media was the best way to get readers, musicians took notice of this new playing field and found ways to cut out the middle man.
The “music blog” came in various forms.