Still Here - A Rant

Yes, I'm still here. I haven't been posting much of late - too busy, generally lazy, the holiday season, you know. I have had plenty of ideas but motivation? Not so much. And there is actually a pretty good reason for the apathy.

Since October 20th I've had 7 of my posts deleted by Blogger/Google in conjunction with the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Here's how it works; the post is deleted, they inform you via e-mail that they've done it, and they tell you what post got x-ed. The clincher is they don't tell you what content triggered the deletion. Most of the posts x-ed were Funky Fridays with multiple tracks. The only clear content deleted was a Madonna post. The real clincher is that 5 of the 7 posts deleted were old, off the front page, had no content - the links to music were dead. The Madonna post included. So all that really got deleted was my writing. And that just pissed me off.

I know that we audio bloggers are a controversial group to the music industry, but personally I don't think I cost anybody sales by posting a track here and there. I've never hidden what I do. I've been doing it since August of 2001, and recently had my millionth page view. I never go negative, and generally everything posted gets good press. It is clear that the industry doesn't know what it is doing - I get sent music all the time by labels, often the same ones who decry the internet interference.

So that leaves me uncertain of what I want to do here. I'd like to keep on keeping on, but don't want to have to keep reconstructing deleted posts, which I have been doing. What a drag.