Blogscraping - A Scourge on thesixtyone!

I've long hated the HearYa and especially the palms out sounds blog scrapes. And I'm not the only one. I know that most of the posted songs (most of them remixes of extremely varying quality) eventually get a handful of bumps, and a small percentage "make" it whether they deserve to or not. But man, they really pile on the dreck for me. matttynabib posted some well thought out points on the site forum just recently, but I think its worth mentioning here.

In my opinion, the61 is "mature" enough not to need automatic infusions of songs from anywhere. The few gems that get entrained in the blogs are tarnished because they have no artist support on the site itself - scraped artists may not even know their songs have been put up here, and thus artist and fan get no chance at interaction. All in all it's a net minus to me.

This is more of a rant than a thoughtful analysis, but what good is a blog if you can't rant every now and then?

10 comments:

timyjl said...

Rant on iyzie, I feel your pain.

d said...

Aw, you don't like HearYa. I actually actively started to follow that blog because I like a decent amount of songs they post on that blog.

That being said, I do think you make valid points even if I'm not sure yet that I agree the system should be ended completely.

Distilled1 said...

I agree and rant on. Its sad if the artist can not interact as that is part of the idea (at least in my opinion)
Distilled1Rush

Jon Clark said...

I think it was started to provide a constant feed of songs, while the site was getting its legs.
It probably isn't necessary anymore, but I still like it, Particularily stereogum and robosexual's infrequent posts. There is the occassional palmsoutsound track that I enjoy, but I agree with regarding the overall quality of the contribution. I'd say the average song coming out of the scrapes is still better than the average overall song being posted (but it's getting close) and until the scrapes aren't as good, they might as well stay.

shayborg said...

I've found some great tracks off HearYa uploads, and Stereogum in particular is usually pretty decent quality. Quite simply the blog music on average is better than music directly uploaded by artists. (Though yes, despite the occasional gem PalmsOutSounds sucks. Hence the acronym.)

I do think the blog scraping is a little weird because the artists aren't involved at all, but if it leads to better music I can't really complain.

iyzie said...

@d & shayborg - I might be convinced to back off HearYa. I lumped them in because recalled actively disliking several recent uploads from them. It is true that sterogum and missingtoof and some others put up some quality stuff - but they do so from artists who will likely never show (or even know) their presence on the61.

I suppose most of my objection might be erased if a) POS scrape was discontinued and b) scraping of all remixes not originating from the original artist was discontinued.

Jon Clark said...

If they wanted to institute a peer reviewed system I'd gladly take a blog and properly tag it, give it more or less appropriate genres and even contact the band the alert them, invite them to use the account. Sam, James, if you're reading, think about it.

Anonymous said...

I filled in the 'Get to know your fellow 61er' questioner and sent it to Batface. The thing I said I'd change was the scrapes. My main reason being I see it as possibly being a thin end of the wedge to losing the personal interaction between listener and artist.
I'm pissed matty beat me to being controversial ;)

Soge shirts said...

Yeah I don't like it either. If someone hasn't consciously made the effort to upload their songs on the 61, and have no intentions to interact with the people that are bumping their songs on there, then I think the sixty one could do without them.

d said...

ImOnlySleeping, I think the peer review system is an interesting idea and I know I would be willing to assist in that sort of effort if it was developed in that way.

I also had similar ideas regarding contacting bands whose songs do get scraped even extending back to contacting bands whose songs have already been scraped. It would be nice to get more artists like Santogold whose first song was scraped but then who did actually use the account to upload a second song (The original L.E.S. Artistes did not come from the blogs). For artists whose scraped songs have been successful, we'd already be able to point at a page on the site and say "There are people here who like your music and would love to hear more." That's also sort of one reason I'm not entirely against the blog scraping system, because it can allow artists to already know coming into here that there are people who listen to and support their music already here.