MP3 Blogs Ride the Podcast Wave
MP3 blogs deliver a healthy supply of free music downloads, and their influence is growing quickly.
Salt Lake City, UT (PRWEB) May 1, 2006
MP3 blogs deliver a healthy supply of free music downloads, and their influence is growing quickly. An MP3 blog is a website that offers free music content on a regular basis. Typical MP3 blogs will feature one or two tracks from a new album, and share interesting details about the band, along with a critique. An MP3 blog is a type of podcast, which uses syndication technologies to distribute music files to podcatchers and aggregators.
A podcatcher is software which automatically downloads new MP3 posts on subscribed feeds. Aggregators pull many feeds together in a single place, to help users find blogs they might enjoy.
MP3 blogs have been around for many years, technically, but they didn't start to reach a large audience until the end of 2004, when the first podcatchers and aggregators began to appear.
Since September, 2004, MP3 blogs have exploded into popularity. In late 2004, there were dozens of MP3 blogs. A few weeks later, there were hundreds. Near the beginning of 2005, there were thousands, and today, there are hundreds of thousands.
Integrated podcatchers have been added to iTunes and Winamp. It's only a matter of time before Windows Media Player follows suit, and in the mean-time, there are dozens of stand-alone podcatchers available that integrate easily with any of the players mentioned.
Many MP3 blogs concentrate on niche genres, sharing obscure music you couldn't find anywhere else. Some are more eclectic. What's really special about MP3 blogs, is that posting tends to be contagious. One blog will feature a new song, and within a few hours, it might appear on six other blogs. Musicians and record labels are catching on to the buzz that MP3 bloggers can generate, and most currently offer one or two free tracks per album to entice the MP3 blog audience, and that audience is growing quickly.
Various organizations around the world award Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Diamond certifications for top selling albums. Knobtweakers. net is an MP3 blog that offers free electronic music downloads. The owner, Eric Hamilton, began considering similar honors for the best performing free download features on Knobtweakers. net when "Force of Nature", by Xiod (AKA Trance Emerson) topped 100,000 downloads.
Knobtweakers was among the first Mp3 blogs to concentrate exclusively on legal (authorized) downloads, and keep a complete archive of features available for users -- something most other MP3 blogs would get in trouble for. Because of the permanent archive of free downloads, artists have more time to get exposed to a much larger audience, making Knobtweakers one of the most influential MP3 blogs to date. Other popular MP3 blogs include Stereogum and Fluxblog.
Sites like Stereogum and Knobtweakers can expose a song to more listeners than a major metro radio station, and that's great news for independent artists.
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