HW 16: Blogging Helping the Music Industry

While reading the chapter The Blog Business: It’s More Like Music Than Publishing, I became a little bored. Nothing against John Battelle, but relating business and blogging really isn’t my main interest in life. So I read the chapter as I was supposed to and then I came across the section that mentioned how small audiences can find their interests easier with the use of blogging. Then John brings up an example of this, he uses the producer Danger Mouse and how he got overnight success. Danger Mouse wasn’t a well known producer until he came out with the Grey Album which is a mash up of the Beatles White Album, and Jay-Z’s Black Album. John claims that with this Grey Album the word got tossed around the internet and people started reacting in an astonishing way. “He had something like a million downloads of his album in a week! It was really, I think, the first example of a smash hit in the music business that had nothing to do with a music label at all” (Battelle, 166). That is amazing to me, that he could have this much response in a week, and it is all because of the internet. After seeing this I had to learn more and actually looked up the album and listened to it. I really like Danger Mouse’s work and found out that he was part of another group Gnarles Barkley, I also like this group that he is in but never knew he was a part of it. The more important result of this reading and researching is that I did learn that blogging can have an effect on marketing and business. The way the information was presented this time though, with a current and interesting example helped me understand the concept better, so that may be a suggestion for others trying to get their point across. That is what blogs are trying to do essentially as John would say, trying to get that personal bond with the consumer.

Blog!, David Kline and Dan Burstein,
Quote is from interview with John Battelle