I had a trawl through some old bookmarks last weekend. Yeah, it's pretty rock and roll out here in the rural Vale.
I was curious to see which of the old mp3 blogs were still up, never mind still posting. I mean I was talking about the decline of the mp3 blog format in 2013, but I was hoping that the sites were still available.
Yet at the risk of getting all Retromania, I'm saddened by how sites like The Beat!, No Pain In Pop, Waves At Night, Altered Zones, and so many more are either 404s or worse, taken over and hosting VPN or trading spuff. Is this astroturfing? Digital squatting? There's definitely a term for it, Tedium will have something I'm sure.
Thankfully some are still up with archives you can trawl through rather than go via the Wayback Machine. The Ill-ec-tron-ic (last post 2012), Rose Quartz (2013), 20jazzfunkgreats (January of this year, so maybe will come back?) remain. And would you look at that Simon Reynolds is still rocking with Blogger, posting regularly across multiple strands; blissblog, Energy Flash, and yes Retromania amongst others.
Let's wrap this up with something from blissblog then, something post-punk too as it's been a long while since we had a bit of that. Here's the Floridian post-punk outfit The Stick Figures with the knotty but funky N-Light.
Image credit: SPUI, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
