2003: MP3 Blogs and Pitchfork Shake Up Music Media
Online music and blogging were two key trends in the first decade of digital culture. In 2003, they combine in the form of MP3 blogs. Together with Pitchfork, they revolutionize music journalism.
Season 4 of Cybercultural has been focused on the rise of digital culture from 1994 through to 2003, a period that encompasses the beginning of the web, moves through the dot-com boom and bust, and ends the year before Web 2.0 emerges. During this season, I've written a lot about how both online music and blogging evolved from 1994-2003 — helping to push the internet into mainstream culture. It's appropriate, then, that the final post of this season looks at a sub-trend that combines these two topics: music blogs, a.k.a. "MP3 blogs."
By 2003, with the blogosphere now established, music fans had begun to gravitate to blogs to pontificate about the music and artists they loved. It was no longer necessary to set up an entire website, like the proprietors of Teenage Wildlife and BowieWonderworld — two leading David Bowie fan sites — had done in the 1990s. If you simply wanted to express your opinions about music online, without the technical hassle of dealing with a web server, then a blogging service like Blogger or LiveJournal was the way to go. (You could still opt for a Geocities site, but its geographic metaphors were now considered passé on the web).
Fluxblog & LCD Soundsystem
One such music fan was Matthew Perpetua, a recent art school graduate from Brooklyn, who had been running his site Fluxblog since early 2002. He’d started out on Blogger (newflux.blogspot.com) with the intention of moving to a different host, but had stuck with the now Google-owned service. Perpetua posted mostly about music — his goal from the start had been to publish “special links, commentary, music recommendations, petty gossip.”
The “special links” were MP3 files, and they were not strictly legal. It was kind of like a blog version of Napster, only Perpetua was hosting the MP3 links himself — temporarily. At the top of the blog was this message: “Please Note That MP3s Are Only Offered For A Limited Time And Are Changed Frequently.”
The format was fairly simple: every day (or second day), post one or two MP3 files along with a sentence or two of commentary. In a lot of cases, the MP3 files were by relatively unknown indie artists — on May 23, 2003, for instance, Perpetua posted three songs by Kazmi with Rickies, The Sounds, and The Exploding Hearts. But he’d also post bootlegs from well-known artists. On May 28, he posted a bootleg from a 1985 Prince concert, as well as a 1980 single from Alice Cooper called “Clones (We're All).”
In addition to the MP3 postings, there were irregular concert reviews and even a review of the movie The Matrix Reloaded — which Perpetua panned. But music was his mainstay and on June 6, 2003, he wrote about a concert he’d been to in Brooklyn. The lead act was a popular local band called The Rapture (months later, Pitchfork would place them at number one in its 2003 best albums list). But Perpetua was more interested in the opening act, LCD Soundsystem, who were largely unknown at the time; they’d only formed the previous year and so far had released just two singles. Perpetua was even able to approach the band after the show.
“I spoke to LCD Soundsystem's leader/singer James Murphy (who looks like a cross between Pete & Pete's Endless Mike and Six Feet Under's Nate Fisher) when they were packing up, and he told me that they were planning on releasing two more singles in 2003, and that their album would be out in 2004. I'm very excited to hear more.”
At this point, few people would’ve read that over-excited review of a nascent Brooklyn band on an obscure Blogspot site. Fluxblog was “a blog written with the intended audience of people I knew from message boards,” Perpetua later said in an interview. And it stayed that way for much of 2003, until he had a breakthrough when he posted LCD Soundsystem’s third single, “Yeah,” about a month before its official release.
The Tipping Point
On December 12, 2003, Perpetua put an MP3 file of “Yeah (Stupid Version)” onto Fluxblog. “Going on all of the stray unreleased LCD Soundsystem songs circulating online right now and the amazing opening set that I saw them play at Irving Plaza in support of The Rapture earlier in the year, it seems as though they are preparing to drop one hell of a debut album,” he gushed.
Perpetua also pointed to a bulletin board where he’d started a discussion about the song, which had received a lot of comments. He admitted that he didn’t know the origin of the MP3 file:
“I have no idea whether it's been released yet — on soulseek [a file sharing network], it's part of some record, but I think it's just a promo. I'm trying to figure this out. A DJ friend of mine from England sent me a message last night telling me to download it because he couldn't stop playing it, and that's about as much as I know.”
The following day on Fluxblog, Perpetua writes that “there's been a major spike in traffic since I posted the LCD Soundsystem song — this blog had over 1000 hits yesterday, and it looks like it should be just a little bit shy of the same number today.”
He urges the “400-500+ extra people” to stick around — “I post cool stuff here all the time.”
According to a later Time Out magazine profile, some of those new readers were “A&R types,” DJs and music magazine editors, who began monitoring Fluxblog to look for trends and upcoming talent. These days, we’d say that Fluxblog attracted the attention of industry influencers, and by doing that it soon became an influencer itself.
So that late-2003 post of the LCD Soundsystem song turned out to be a tipping point, causing Fluxblog to become a key member of the nascent music blogosphere. Perpetua later said it “changed the course of my life.”
As an aside: I’d had my own blogging breakthrough earlier in 2003, with a July post on Read/WriteWeb entitled “Weblogs should be topic-first, not author-first.” I was riffing on something Clay Shirky, a published author and early blog influencer, had said. Shirky himself linked back to my post, along with a bunch of other tech bloggers. In its own small way, that was my everything has changed moment. Now I wasn’t writing to the void, wondering if anyone was out there. Suddenly, my blog had readers! I'm sure Perpetua felt something similar.
Naming a Trend
Of course, it’s not a trend until someone coins a name for it. The term “MP3 blog” arose sometime during 2004. In a May 2004 article in Vue Weekly, an arts and entertainment weekly magazine from Edmonton, Perpetua was called the “forefather of MP3 blogs.” By July of that year, he’d been mentioned in a USA Today article, which stated that MP3 blogs were “part online mixtape, part diary, and part music magazine.”
So how did MP3 blogs fit into an online music scene that was increasingly being defined by Pitchfork, an online magazine founded in 1996 by Ryan Schreiber (who, like Perpetua, lived in Brooklyn). Pitchfork had also noticed LCD Soundsystem during 2003 — in February, LCD Soundsystem's debut single "Losing My Edge" was mentioned as a comparison point in a review of another artist. There were a couple of other off-hand mentions through the year, but LCD Soundsystem didn't become a Pitchfork fixture until its debut album was released in January 2005 (it was given an 8.2 out of 10 rating the following month).
So Fluxblog and other MP3 blogs really were at the cutting edge of identifying new music trends, while Pitchfork was more the 'fast follower' that pushed artists like LCD Soundsystem to a wider audience of global hipsters.
Pitchfork's Version of Reality
The Pitchfork story is itself illustrative of how the internet changed music journalism. One of Schreiber's goals was to dethrone the older artists that baby boomer publications like Rolling Stone still venerated — artists like David Bowie and The Rolling Stones. In an oral history published by Slate in 2024, Schreiber (then in middle age himself) reflected on his attitude in 1999: “I was definitely looking at this new decade ahead and going, Man, we’re going to need a whole new canon. And I felt like that was on Pitchfork’s shoulders.”
In its “best of” list at the end of 2003, Pitchfork declared that it “was the first year that felt like a fully formed part of the 00’s.” 2003 didn’t belong to established artists, the article contended, but “an entirely new crop of songwriters and artists burrowed out the woodwork, laying the foundation for the decade as it will be remembered when we leave it six years from now.” Radiohead’s latest album finished fourth on this top-50 list, so by “established” Pitchfork clearly meant boomer artists like Bowie, whose 2003 album didn't make the cut.
Number one on Pitchfork’s end-of-year list? The debut album by the now forgotten Brooklyn-based band, The Rapture. Even at the time, this band was barely known outside of MP3 bloggers and Pitchfork’s readers. Needless to say, The Rapture did not end up laying the foundation for the future of music.
In 2003, the musical reality you lived in was increasingly being determined by which online communities you frequented. This was a trend that would only intensify during Web 2.0, when social media took over the media landscape.
Thus Ends Season 4
As noted at the top of this article, this is the final post of season 4 — the rise of digital culture from 1994-2003. In January, we'll kick off season 5 with a brand new theme!
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