A musical blog party

By Douglas Wolk

July 3, 2005 12 AM PT

Special to The Times

The Tofu Hut isn’t a building, and it’s got nothing to do with soy protein. It’s a website: a one-guy-and-pals blog hosted by a free service. Surf to it (tofuhut.blogspot.com), and you’ll find extensive commentary from New York waiter John Seroff and his friends and family about the music they love.

Start clicking around on song titles, and you’ll find MP3s of the enormous range of recordings the Tofu Hut’s contributors are passionately discussing: Canadian power-pop band Sloan’s “False Alarm,” jazz pianist Art Tatum’s “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” country star John (Big & Rich) Rich’s out-of-print pre-fame solo track “Old Blue Mountain.”

A 1934 recording of a vocal style called “eephing” prompted Seroff’s mom to write: “Is this old time rap or strange country sex? Doesn’t it sound like strange country sex to you? Well?” Seroff throws in lots of links and photos, as well as some history (“Jimmy Riddle, a country music harmonica player for Roy Acuff’s band, is probably the best-known ‘eepher’ ”).

On the page’s right-hand column, you’ll see hundreds of links to other MP3 blogs -- weblogs that present audio files from their hosts’ collections, one at a time.

Nobody’s sure who came up with the first MP3 blog, and the evolution of the form was gradual enough that it’s hard to pinpoint the date of its origin, although it was probably in 2002.

As recently as a year ago, there were perhaps two dozen music blogs. Now there are well over 50, with more appearing every day from all over the world, specializing in everything from hard-core punk to pre-World War II gospel.

Music blogging has developed into a subculture with its own unofficial leaders and unwritten rules, and it’s becoming a significant force in the music industry, which mostly seems to be smiling on the phenomenon.

There’s a relatively standard format for MP3 blogs that’s unofficially evolved: one or two songs a day, each one accompanied by a paragraph or two about the song or the artist. Some bloggers also include photographs or links to places where their readers can buy the CD on which each song appears.

Most focus on little-known musicians or rare and out-of-print recordings; few will post something that’s already a huge radio hit or by a very famous artist, and it’s frowned upon to post more than a single song from a given album.

It’s also become standard etiquette to remove each audio file after it’s been up for a few days or weeks, and many music blogs note on their front pages that they’ll remove any song upon the copyright holder’s request.

Still, the first question a lot of people ask about MP3 blogs is if they’re legal. The answer is that it’s a gray area, and MP3 bloggers tend to work from the principle that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

None has been sued, and nobody’s talking about suing them. Record companies and other copyright holders have generally been tolerant of them, to the point of sending prominent music bloggers free CDs in the hope that they’ll promote them by posting a song or two.

In fact, Universal Music Group’s European division is paying Matthew Perpetua, the 25-year-old curator of Fluxblog (www.fluxblog.org), to be a talent scout (he sends them an annotated CD-R of his favorite new music once a month).

Fluxblog was one of the earliest MP3 blogs, and it’s still one of the most popular, with between 4,000 and 5,000 visitors a day. That’s not much compared with, say, a big radio station’s listenership, but many of Fluxblog’s readers are tastemakers -- DJs, journalists, music fanatics who spread the word to their friends -- and Perpetua is a tastemaker among tastemakers: an independent, noncommercial curator, dedicated to spreading the word about interesting new music before anyone else does.

What makes these sites interesting is that they’re filtered through a single person’s (or a small group’s) aesthetic. Unlike radio or traditional print media, they never second-guess other people’s tastes -- which makes them much more trustworthy to suspicious music lovers.

The Fiery Furnaces, the Arcade Fire and M.I.A. all got a big push from the MP3 blog world early on, and that’s translated to public curiosity, heavily attended shows and, ultimately, album sales. The Tofu Hut’s Seroff says he’s effectively “offering free advertising to a select clientele” of 1,200 or 1,300 visitors a day.

While the music industry is still suing hundreds of users of file-sharing services like Kazaa every month, MP3 blogs have run into little trouble; Perpetua and Seroff say they’ve each been asked only once to remove a song from their sites, and they did so right away.

“There seems to be a remarkable level of self-policing among bloggers,” Seroff notes. “I don’t see a lot of interest in hyping open directories where people throw on an entire Nirvana boxed set.” One site, Scenestars (www.scenestars.net), recently posted multiple tracks from a New Order album before its release and was harshly criticized in the music blog community for breaking a sort of social contract.

The first legal slapdown of a notable music blog (and the only one to date) happened in mid-January, when the Europe-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry sent a cease-and-desist order to the company hosting the site’s files after tracks by Public Enemy and the Stone Roses were posted on Moistworks (www.moistworks.com). A few weeks later, Moistworks was up and running again with a different host, and “Stone Roses-free.”

MP3 blogs are still a grass-roots phenomenon, and they’re done only for love. Nobody’s figured out how to get anything but a little prestige from curating one, and most bloggers don’t have many ethical quandaries about what they do, since they’re not making money from it. It’s also possible to start a blog very cheaply, or even for free -- one reason they’ve multiplied so quickly.

All a prospective blogger needs is a site, a way to host the files, and a way to get the word out. The site is easy enough: Free services such as Blogger.com provide the basic setup for a lot of music bloggers. The word can spread through friends’ links, or through clearinghouse “metablogs” like MP3blogs.org. And YouSendIt.com -- originally intended as a free tool for e-mailing large files -- has also become a favorite resource for nascent MP3 bloggers.

“For months, I was lamenting that there were no hip-hop blogs,” Seroff says. “Then the YouSendIt revolution happened, and all of a sudden every 20-year-old who was into hip-hop can buy the new mix tape and throw up a track. That’s really where I was hoping this would go.”

“At first,” Seroff says, “MP3 bloggers were rock critics and a couple of outsiders who wished they were rock critics, and lately it’s been more like some kid in Zimbabwe who’s really into Brazilian music and wants to share.”

Andre Wiesmayr, a New York art director who’s been running the music blog Bumrocks (bumrocks.com) for about a year, is a bit more cynical about MP3 blogs’ explosive growth: “There’s no reason for half of these sites to exist -- I get a weird, self-promoting vibe out of a lot of them. It’s all dudes, and it’s all geeks.”

He’s also much more impressed by blogs that present peculiar, forgotten or out-of-print music than by those that chase after the next big thing: “I feel like the best sites are people with crazy record collections. That, to me, is a lot more interesting than a bunch of kids going ‘I’ve got a pre-release of the latest Daft Punk record.’ ”

And Fluxblog’s Perpetua suggests that record labels could easily get in on the action to promote their back catalogs with blogs of their own. “Labels don’t seem to get that websites have to be updated constantly,” he says. “You want to encourage people to keep coming back to them. People would visit a Blue Note Records blog every day.”

Find a blog to float your boat

More bloggers headline

Benn Loxo Du Taccu: mattgy.net/music

(African pop)

‘Buked & Scorned: buked.blogspot.com (underground eclectica)

Cocaine Blunts & Hip Hop Tapes: www.cocaineblunts.com (obscuro hip-hop)

Copy, Right?: copycommaright.blogspot.com (covers of every stripe)

The Mystical Beast: mysticalbeast.blogspot.com (long-forgotten rock)

Said the Gramophone: saidthegramophone.com

(indie rock and its cousins)

Soul Sides: soul-sides.com (ultra-rare soul)

Spoilt Victorian Child: www.spoiltvictorianchild.co.uk (indie and psychedelia)