Warner Music Tries (And Fails) To Make Friends With Music Bloggers

from the nice-try dept

MP3 blogs have been getting a lot of attention lately. The blogs, which usually focus on certain genres of music with the idea to highlight or expose certain new or obscure acts to a wider audience are growing in popularity. They often post an entire MP3 as well. However, it appears that some of the attention directed at these blogs made it to some executives at Warner Brothers Records. In a moment of enlightenment (considering typical record company reaction), instead of trying to shut these sites down, they decided to see what would happen if they embraced them. Someone from Warner contacted a number of these blogs, including an MP3 from a band they wanted to promote. This is somewhat surprising, as many of the sites certainly expected to get sued before they received MP3s from a major label. Still, the effort had its problems. The musician had already been featured months ago on some of the sites, and didn't fit at all with the focus of some of the other sites. Plus, the fear of looking like record company lackeys didn't appeal to many of the sites. Even worse, though, was that on the one site that did post the tracks, a number of out-of-place comments began appearing talking about how "awesome" the band was. A quick check of the IP addresses of the posters, though, showed they came from... Warner Brothers. So, while it's really great that they're actually trying to embrace these sorts of promotions, they still need to learn a thing or two about dealing with bloggers. Still, it's clearly a step forward from an industry that hasn't made many steps in that direction recently.