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Blogosphere of influence
With postings and podcasts, fans of local music draw others to their sites
Three times a week and sometimes more than once a day, Brad Searles, a software tester and unabashed music geek, repairs to the small alcove in his Allston apartment his wife affectionately calls "the cave." There, amid stacks of CDs, comic books, and vinyl, and free from more pressing practical concerns, Searles, 37, can indulge his hobby: writing about rock 'n' roll.
The results are collected on Bradley's Almanac (bradleysalmanac.com), a music blog that has grown from humble origins seven years ago, when it was nothing more than a personal diary , to become a respected local authority. On a typical day, Searles estimates, the Almanac attracts between 3,000 and 5,000 unique users, enormous traffic for an independently run site.
Partly, these numbers reflect Searles' s commitment to posting his recordings of live shows, which aren't available anywhere else on the Web. But mostly, the success of the Almanac has everything to do with geography. At a time when the blogosphere is crowded by self-appointed music authorities, most of them commenting on the same popular national indie rock and pop acts, Searles consistently speaks directly to a Boston audience.
"When you're creating a site on a national scale, you're going to end up with a lot of pre-filtered stuff," Searles said. "You're also going to miss out on a lot of bands that haven't really been discovered. It's more work to do things locally, but there is a pay off. It's always in the back of my head -- that there could be this really great band out there, but people just don't know about it yet."
In this way, the Almanac is similar to Band in Boston (bandinbostonpodcast.com), a blog and podcast series run by Andy Guthrie, 29 and Jen Kelley, 34, both of Somerville. That site, which features downloadable sets by national and local acts, taped in Guthrie and Kelley's living room, is a love letter to the dozens of bands that fly under the radar of mainstream media outlets. Both Bradley's Almanac and Band in Boston angle for the local connection -- an increasingly important goal for bloggers.
"The playing field has definitely become overcrowded and the general din is overwhelming," said Frank Yang, who runs a well-known blog called Chrome Waves (chromewaves.net), which is based out of Toronto. "Everyone and their mother is starting a music blog and for the most part, is talking about the same thing as everyone else."
Adds Krysta Chauncey, the editor of a Boston blog called All That She Surveys (queenofnotes.blogspot.com): "National blogs are human aggregators, or litmus tests for what's catching on everywhere. Local blogs help maintain a sense of place."
For Searles, Guthrie, and Kelley, maintaining that sensibility has been mostly a labor of love. Searles, a longtime musician, says he would be blogging about music whether or not anyone was reading it -- "and for a long time, no one was reading it," he laughed. "So there you go."
"Professional music journalists, to a certain extent, have to cover bands that are safe to write about," added Guthrie. "Our site wasn't a 'screw you' to any of the newspapers here or anything. This was just something we really felt like we should do: help highlight a bunch of the bands we loved, that weren't getting enough attention."
By recording as many as three bands a week, Band in Boston has compiled an impressive number of podcasts, made up mostly of bands from the local scene. Some, like Faces on Film, Frank Smith, Age Rings, and Keys to the Streets of Fear, are familiar names to area rock aficionados. Some, like the Colt Thompson Project, are still seeking to define their place on Boston's rock circuit. And some, like The Jaguar Club, a Brooklyn outfit, and The Teeth, from Philadelphia, use Band in Boston to market themselves on a grassroots level.
But regardless of motivation or state of origin, many of the musicians who have agreed to play for Guthrie and Kelley said they did so with the understanding that Band in Boston had found a way to circumvent the fickle and often homogeneous output from other rock sites.
"I see the site as sort of a hub, a place to check in," said Marc Pinansky, whose band, Township, has played several Band in Boston sets. "Being in a band, you search the Internet religiously for reviews and news, and it's rare you find a place to find new music from people who really care about music."
While Bradley's Almanac has helped foster this sense of a local music community, Searles's site is commonly seen as a more prescriptive influence on area fans than Band in Boston, which is short on in-depth commentary. ("They are awesome," Guthrie and Kelley wrote about a band called Hands and Knees; "What can I say? " reads the blurb for Tom Thumb. "Just listen up.")
In November of last year, for instance, Searles caught Washington, D.C., rockers Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the Opera House, and taped the show with a
Searles says that he's rarely asked by bands to remove MP3s from his site, which is testament to the influence his site has on Boston fans.
"If it's a touring band, and they aren't easy to approach, I'll try and get a feel for their attitudes toward taping, either through message boards or existing live recordings," he says. "I've been remarkably fortunate to not only avoid getting take-down e - mails, but to get ones from bands or labels that say, 'Thanks,' or 'Can you send me a burn of that on disc?' "
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
