How MP3 blogs kept me plugged into music scene

Welcome to Internet Nostalgia Days, a celebration of the endless lives we have all lived online

In the pie chart of my life, a sizable slice could be labelled “organizing iTunes library.” I was an obsessive collector during high school and university, and felt the contents of my iPod were as much a reflection of my personality as the way I dressed or the company I kept. This was before discovering new music was as easy as signing in to a streaming service and letting the algorithm do its work.

Building a music library of cool and interesting bands took careful research, sampling and curation. The linchpin of this pursuit was the humble MP3, the file format that had, along with Napster and other file-sharing programs, brought the entire music industry to its knees.

While the MP3 made pirating music trivially easy, it also gave rise to a thriving online community of music bloggers that gave indie acts a way to circumvent the labels and the traditional channels of distribution to find new fans.

These MP3 blogs, as they came to be known, competed to find and promote the coolest new music, and provide readers with links to downloadable music files.

The heyday of MP3 blogs was from the mid-2000s until sometime around 2010, and the general sound and esthetic was admittedly limited. But to me, a kid in Saskatoon, who felt far removed from the places where cool stuff happened, discovering these music blogs still felt like connecting to a whole new world of sound.

Picking through vinyl at the musty independent record shop was never my thing, mostly because it was such an overwhelming experience.

But online you could find incredible new music every day, and a whole village of enthusiastic music nerds to guide you through the stacks.

Some of the decade’s most memorable acts, such as LCD Soundsystem and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, likely owe a big part of their success to the music nerds of the Internet.

And it wasn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. Every country had its scene, including Canada. It was Canadian MP3 blogs that made me realize how much fantastic music we produced in this country.

Music blogs ultimately burned themselves out. Other platforms took over the Internet and many of the amateur music writers who drove the scene simply got too old or too tired to keep up the relentless pace for a diminishing audience.

Some of the earliest and most successful sites like Brooklyn Vegan and Stereogum continue to publish, but many of my old bookmarked sites are now gone.

Those still accessible usually carry some manner of goodbye post as their final entries, often citing exhaustion as the reason to call it quits.

“I can’t pinpoint when I stopped enjoying writing about bands,” Bryan Acker, the founder of the popular Halifax-based blog Herohill wrote in his final post in 2013 after a full decade of running the site.

“I just know it happened, and no matter what I’ve tried the joy I took from writing is gone.”