what do you have to do to get sued around here?

Word. just read that Said the Gramophone received a C+D recently- hope everything works out ok for Sean and the crew. These things seem to pop up completely at random with the mp3 blog community, as if the record companies just pick some poor blog every few months to keep everyone else on their toes.. given the level of co-operation that goes on most of the time (both tacit and explicit), it makes for a very confusing situation.

went to see M.I.A last week in Norwich- poor sound blighted the first half of the show but she turned it around in some style, review is up here.

also..

just to point out, the new tiefschwarz album is awesome.

Show me the numbers...

Word. Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the survey- i was hoping for a response rate of about 30% and actually got around 40%, which either means that you're all very nice or that bloggers just love talking about themselves. Either way, much appreciated.

Anyway, to business- the headline results of the survey are now available here, and should be up until the end of June. What you won't be able to see from this is anyone's individual responses, or the answers to the open-ended questions- there wasn't any way to do this via SurveyMonkey without compromising people's privacy. I'll be posting a representative sample of the open-ended responses soon- if anyone wants to have a look at the entire set or check up on their own responses, please get in touch and i'll be happy to help.

When you've had a look at the results, please feel free to leave comments here, or email me with anything you find particularly interesting. A couple of things that have struck me...

- you're all boys!

- the relatively low number of bloggers who've been asked to remove tracks/threatened with any sort of punishment for hosting tracks.

- the difference between relationships between major and indie labels.

- concern about the commercialisation of music blogs.

- the low values accorded by most bloggers to using music blogs as a means of problematising copyright.

- the appalling number of people who prefer Arcade Fire to M.I.A.

looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks, thanks again... loz x

they don't call it a process for nothin'....

Well here we are. Apart from the odd unrecognised blog name i come across, the survey's are pretty much all out. almost 100 responses to date, for which I'm very grateful- am hoping to have at least some headline results available on the site this week, dependent on how long it takes me to convert this mass of data into an excel/spss file. If nothing else, i'm already in a position to reflect a bit on the research process, offering the following pearls of wisdom:

1. Although there are some massive advantages to doing this kind of work online, it doesn't change the fact that looking through 400-odd blogs for email addresses is not the world's most stimulating task.

2. Only when you've finished designing a survey and sent it out will you begin to notice its glaring errors.

3. People may be (quite understandably) suspicious of your motives. Personally i didn't think the survey was remotely professional enough to have come from a marketing company, but perhaps that's the whole point... spooky.

Hope everyone is well. Am off to try and cut down the review backlog for my other site. Laters.

it begins

sent out first 136 surveys today. apart from the inevitable 'address unknown' responses, and a moment of blind stupidity where i failed to actually open the survey for people to fill it in, things seem to be going well. thanks are due to anyone who has already responded, and especially to the Tofu Hut for their comprehensive blogroll...