EDIT: Please note that this is not a personal attack against any individual site. Any blogs mentioned here are used solely to provide real-life examples to many of the troubling issues I see within this industry. This article should not be interpreted in any other way. Thank you for the support.
The news is filled with stories about financial, political and social greed. Countless individuals are motivated solely by their bottom line. When I first entered the blog scene, I entered with one goal in mind, and it certainly wasn’t how much money I could make. To me, music blogs should operate solely for one purpose: to serve as a system to promote the countless up-and-coming artists who create musical masterpieces consistently yet without recognition.
However, in recent months I have seen a disturbing shift occurring within the blog world. The music blog industry is now “over-saturated” with new blogs popping up on a daily basis. This has left us with an over-competitive scene that has spawned some ridiculous behavior. Sites are trashing their competitors, purchasing Facebook likes, and doing essentially anything possible to create a competitive edge in order to draw maximum amounts of traffic, thus increasing ad revenue and download totals. It is no longer about the artists, rather, it’s a race to see who can be the biggest and “best” blog.
DML has never been about any of that. We’ve always strove to create a user-friendly experience. While we do have advertising, it is as unobtrusive as possible and most of the revenue is used to pay for the general upkeep of the site. We were one first websites to start using Soundcloud rather than a pay-per-download site such as Hulkshare. This required a significant investment on our part to purchase a premium account in an effort to provide our readers with direct downloads and no advertisements. Unfortunately, we along with most other sites who moved to Soundcloud eventually had their accounts terminated; we still consider that a wise investment and are actively pursuing another method to provide readers with the easiest way to download their tracks.
Furthermore, we’ve always been about bringing you the best music we find, not what others give us. Our personal inboxes and voicemails are spammed daily and filled with requests from artists big and small begging for a spot on our site and while we may post some of them, we still try our hardest to rise above the influence of others and stay true to our main mission of being our own site with our own taste and styles in music. While we may not answer every message, especially if they are not personalized (Everything about DML is personal. We don’t hid behind usernames and such, therefore making us accountable for everything we post. For that reason, we prefer personalized submissions as well), we can guarantee that we still listen to every submission–even giving feedback when it is asked.
We have writers who are passionate about music and who possess a desire to share it. This is not an easy position at all, it is very time-consuming job that requires dedication to scouring the vast corners of the internet to find new and exciting material. These guys do a tremendous job contributing to the website on a volunteer basis. If we chose to run more ads and post every leak we saw, we would probably have enough money to pay our writers. However, we don’t race to post every new “Weezy” leak, we take the time to review our content and provide a “comprehensive” writeup before anything gets published. If you are looking for a site that does that, you’re not looking for a music blog, you’re looking for a leak site. Next time you feel the urge to say that we were 4 hours late on a new track, please consider that.
What really prompted this article, however, was a message I received today. DML had agreed in principle with an artist last week to co-sponsor a mixtape with GoodMusicAllDay. Then I received a message from that artist stating that they had to pull DML’s sponsorship because GMAD was demanding payment to co-sponsor the mixtape. Yes, you read that right. They were DEMANDING payment because there was another blog involved. This also isn’t the first time GMAD has reneged on a co-sponsorship that involved DML. I’m sure many of our readers remember the SEA mixtape we sponsored a few weeks ago; a project we were frankly very excited to be a part of and looking forward to presenting to everyone. Well, we were also co-sponsors on that mixtape with GMAD and one of the expectations was that our logo was to also be featured on the front album artwork. However, for some reason, GMAD chose publish an album artwork that did not feature our logo. To anyone who reads multiple music blogs, I’m sure you will see parallels to the experience suffered by Brian Lovin over at the Kollection. In that case, GMAD’s (now-ex) chief writer editted the orignal album artwork featuring both the Kollection’s and GMAD’s logo to crop out the Kollection’s logo. As Brian originally pointed out in his article regarding his incident, I’m very curious as to why GMAD is hiding competitors’ logos. Last time I checked DML was over a year younger than GMAD and still had less than 10k Facebook fans. What exactly are they worried about?
Quite frankly, I’m tired of all this nonsense. I hate to see some blogs acting in a manner that gives music sites a black eye. A music blog should not require payment to sponsor a mixtape. Doing that puts you at the same level of the very DJs that many in this industry chastise, such as DJ Capcom. A sponsorship should be a sign of complete support for the artist’s productions, not a sign of how deep their wallets are. It’s a new year and the one thing I’m hoping for is that its a return to the true roots of the music blog industry – artist promotion first and site success second. Here’s to hoping you stick with while we focus on quality.
These aren’t just my thoughts- many thanks to the writers of DML – Jordan, Luke, Pat and Aymeric.
