Song, by Toad

Time for some roundtable chat internet-style hot air.  A couple of days ago The Pop Cop had a bit of a dig at The Scotsman’s Under the Radar blog, and today UtR responded.  The accusation was of a lack of quality control, and how the volume of writing which their six writers produces has led to some very mediocre bands being covered.  UtR responded by saying that they aren’t necessarily setting all of these bands up as the Next Great Big Thing, and that they’re under no pressure to fill column inches, so bands really only do get covered if one of their writers likes them enough to devote the necessary time.

Everyone involved agrees that the primary issue is one of taste.  Of course, I personally think both blogs praise some bloody awful music.  They in turn must look at some of the stuff I like and wonder what the fuck I am thinking.  Then again, there are plenty of times where all three of us (and everyone else) are in total accord, which is when bands tend to get famous.  That’s fine – that’s just how taste works, we’re supposed to disagree.  So far, so obvious.

The big difference between the two is that The Pop Cop is written by one person and UtR by six, and once that many people are involved you are increasingly likely to find someone who likes pretty much anything.  As Ally from The Skinny and Clash Magazine responded when I said that he should have declined to write the review of the Broken Records album: ‘what do you expect The Skinny to do – pass it round the office until they find someone who likes it?’  Well with a group blog where people only write about bands they like that is inevitably what is going to happen.

So what’s the consequence?  A lot of content and a muddying of any consistent editorial voice, I suppose, although I do find that UtR is nicely unified by the interspersed editorial articles, almost always written by the two main editors.  The stuff inbetween can be a bit difficult to hold together, though.  I may write a lot of content as well, and all of you will think at least some of it is total and utter shite, but it is distinctly and obviously my voice.  This is something which you will either come to like or you will presumably cease to read after a while, but it certainly gives the site itself a very distinctive personal identity.

This all comes down to the success of blogs and their intersection with proper journalism again, I think. Basically, to get big you need to involve more people, because one person can’t do the requisite amount of work themselves.  But do that and you risk diluting the personal voice which makes blogs so special, and it’s rare that people really get around that problem successfully.  Glasgow PodcART is also produced by a team of people and can suffer from the same scattershot effect, but their constant bickering amongst themselves dilutes it rather effectively.  That interaction itself becomes the disctinctive voice – the defining character of the publication – and crucially it also mitigates against the danger of liking everything by virtue of asking enough people.

In the case of UtR it’s the editorials which punctuate the flow of posts about specific bands and hold the whole thing together, but to really address the specific accusation of the publication itself professing to like too many mediocre bands I think you’d have to treat it more like a blog-magazine.  Basically, I think you’d have to separate out the writers and give them their own columns within the larger UtR banner, with perhaps an aggregated feed as the main column of the page, so people could actually get to know an individual writer’s style and taste, rather than thinking that UtR itself liked pretty much everything, which might seem to be the case sometimes.  It would mean an extensive redesign of the site itself, and it would suddenly turn into a far bigger beast than it is at the moment, but I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be the best way for blogging techniques to be integrated into wider online magazines.  It’s not a new idea, of course, because basically you’d be treating everyone like a columnist.

So there you go, maybe an idea for Under the Radar, and perhaps one for the future of blogzines or whatever you want to call them.  I’d have been tempted to start something like this myself ages ago, but the idea of getting bloggers together is about as ambitious as trying to herd cats, and I’ve got far too much on my plate as it is.  For an example of it being done well, albeit at a far greater scale than necessary, try ScienceBlogs, which is one of my favourite sites on the whole of the internets.

There seem to be a lot of things happening on the internet in and around the Scottish music scene at the moment.  This is nice, because for a while it seemed like the only real participants in McMusic 2.0 were the old stagers like myself, 17 Seconds, The Vinyl Villain, The Pop Cop, And Before the First Kiss (RIP for now) and Manic Pop Thrills.  We can welcome a couple of new sites to the fold as well, in the form of The Steinberg Principle, Across the Kitchen Table and Scottish Friction.  There are the more venerable organs such as Is This Music? and Jock Rock as well, but it seemed like ages since we’d been fed any fresh meat.  There are a few others run by professional journalists, such as Spins ‘n’ Needles, Broon’s Tunes and Lots of Random Words, but they seem for the most part to be places to store their writings for other people, rather than sites with a focus of their own.

It’s all quite old school though: essentially the text from what would have been a magazine or a fanzine of days gone by has simply been moved to the internet which, although it’s an improvement in many ways, is hardly revolutionary.

There are two reasons I think that a lot of this isn’t quite stretching the internet to its full capability just yet.  Firstly, community.  One of the key things the internet can do which traditonal media could never do is to build a community out of the readership who actually get to participate in the project itself.

Some of the blogs mentioned above, and this one as well, go some way to achieving this sense of community.  The Vinyl Villain is probably the best I can think of, in terms of bringing disparate people together and letting them become friends simply by virtue of reading the same website.  It’s not an easy thing to do, and JC has done it very well indeed, but the undisputed kings are the Fence Collective, whose web presence has really helped cement the community of musicians and fans together.  It probably wasn’t really intended to be when it started, but their Beef Board is a masterpiece of Web 2.0 savvy.  And this from a label that doesn’t even sell mp3s.

The other thing which most of the sites mentioned so far really lack is any kind of multimedia.  I am trying, but a look at the BBC’s Homegame Sessions shows you what I mean.  Since the iPlayer they are pretty much the masters of this universe as far as I can tell, and a splendid example of how to bring together print, video and audio in one fairly seamless package.

Recently there have been some new additions to the tartan interwebs, however, which promise to help push us collectively forward a little.

Off the Beaten Tracks – with whom I have collaborated on a couple of Homegame Sessions – is offering live video sessions and band profiles, exploiting the rather amazing Edinburgh architecture to create some really distinctive videos.  The Malcolm Middleton ones from Homegame can be seen here.

Glasgow Podcart – this is more of an arts and music blog, giving it a broader scope, which I like.  They combine their visual, written and podcast material really well.  This is a bit more Web 2.0, if you ask me, although they shower this train wreck of a site with compliments in this episode, so their judgment does seem to leave just a little to be desired.

Products of a Gaseous Brain – Milo will be shocked rigid and make protestations of amateurish bumbling when he sees me put him forward as an example of what a blog can and should be.  It may be rough, but there’s video, podcasts, writing, reviews, random bollocks and everything.  Apart from one unfortunate error, where he interviews yours truly on his podcast, this is a consistently excellent site.

So there we go, things are starting to move forward in this part of the world.  It’s good too, because these new ventures should spur on those of us who have been around for a few year now to do better and more interesting things.  It’s all about ideas these days, and there are some very good ones knocking around at the moment.