MP3 aggregation

MP3 blogs are now at least 5-a-penny. I've only recently started to explore the terrain: soul sides, tofu hut, said the gramaphone and so on.

Recent discoveries: the Daft Punk remix of Franz Ferdinand, and the curiously mesmeric William Shatner/Joe Jackson cover of Pulp's Common People (Shatner is masterly, better than Jarvis Cocker; Jackson is tiresome, both him and his guitar).

In the last few months, Simon Waldman (of Words of Waldman) has transformed himself into 50 quid bloke, and has just launched MP3 blogs aggregator. I predict that Simon's going to have to expand his bandwidth soonish.

How legal are MP3 blogs? Probably about as legal as Napster in its first incarnation, althugh most responsible bloggers post a mixture of MP3s and links to purchase material. I believe recently reported research to be true: there is not a close correlation between music file sharing and music buying: 50 quid 'bloke' will always be spending at least 50 quid - downloads just encourage him/her to explore and buy more widely; while penniless students would not have bought the CDs in whatever case. The success of commercial download sites seems to support this.

What I object to is the attitude of Jeffrey Veen, though. Advocating the use of tools such as wget, which essentially just strips out MP3s from sites, means that the blog is more or less pointless: wget users don't read, they just scrape. Some MP3 bloggers are now starting to implement anti-wget code, and I don't blame them.


NB The Harvard research was covered in The Guardian this week.