The Blog Era Was Perfectly Imperfect
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The heyday of music blogs was all about community, competition, and context. One ex-blogger reminisces on this unique and short-lived chapter of music history.
A few weeks ago during a bout of nostalgia, we launched a new Spotify playlist called Blog Era Hits. That playlist and the songs and artists included (or missed) started a lot of conversations, and one of those was with Tim Larew. Tim is an artist manager, writer, and blog founder, and we decided it was time (once again) to look back at the music blog era.
This is not about me, but I’ve had countless conversations about this subject in the past few months, and almost everyone that participated in that era has a different version of the same story, so I’m going to share mine.
The blog era was the wild west of music distribution and discovery. There was no standardization of music release timing or “best practices” that artists and management were pressured to adhere to; everything was powered by instinct, especially if you had not already fully “made it.” If you were an A-list artist signed to a major label in the early 2010s, your music would go live on iTunes at midnight, Monday night into Tuesday, and in CD form (remember those?) in stores like Best Buy and Target at 10 am Tuesday morning. If you were unlucky, a single or two—sometimes even the whole album—would leak somewhere on the internet a day, or two days, or a week before it was set to release.
