Gentrification

There goes the neighborhood: When The Guardian and The New York Times start doing online new music blogging of their own, they enter the market with certain advantages that independent bloggers can't compete against. They've got professional staff to do design and manage the technology, they have an immediate audience base, and the writers for these blogs are probably getting paid.

How should independent bloggers (that'd be me) respond? Competing directly won't work, in fact, treating it as competition is probably the wrong move altogether. Let's go instead with the poet (Blake, of course): The fool who persists in his folly will become wise. So just keep on writing, agitating, and acting as your muse calls you, even if that means drawing a plumb line at a perpendicular to politics and fashion in the rest of the whole bloody little Onlinenewmusicland. As far as I can tell, I haven't earned a single performance or commission due to this blog, but it has registered on my composing, and that's a reward without a payable price.

And no, The Guardian, The New York Times, The American Music Cartel Center and the critics-who-shall-not-be-high-fived at ArtsJournal won't be especially discouraged by being left off my blogroll, but I wouldn't exactly want to encourage 'em either, would I?