'XPN's MP3 DJ
As program director of the influential WXPN-FM, Bruce Warren reaches an audience of 300,000 devoted fans a week. So why would he maintain a music blog where on a good day 50 people drop by?
Because when he goes home at night, he doesn't want to listen to the Indigo Girls.
"While I respect what the Indigo Girls do, and they have a lot of fans, my favorite music tends to be edgier," he says.
Which is why when you visit Some Velvet Blog you're likely to read about The Transplants, El Presidente! or Scrabbel.
To say the site, named after Lee Hazelwood's 1968 "Some Velvet Morning," has evolved is like saying the Beatles music got more interesting. His first post, on Dec. 31, was cut-and-paste of a 663-word Wall Street Journal report on record sales. No comments, no trackbacks, no nothing.
But Warren, 47, was experimenting. He knew he wanted in on the action because as a serious music head, he loved how other fans were discovering new music, writing about what moved them and offering full-length songs for download.
At first Warren didn't post music, just links to other's Web sites. He was skittish, having read about the recording industry's suits against fans who share music for downloading, and its efforts to stop the use of university servers as giant copying machines.
But he wanted to experience the Full Cleveland.
A month later he was offering songs, too, toeing a gray legal line, but finding the music industry actually appreciated what he and thousands of other Mp3 bloggers are doing: spreading the word in moderation, and steering fans toward sites where they can buy complete albums.
"In order to stay ahead of the curve, sometimes you have to jump into the curve," he says. "I wanted to understand the audience's experience, this connecting to another group of people who are music loves in a non-traditional manner."
So a recent page of his blog offers his thoughts about artists like Langhorne Slim, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and Jamie Lidell as well as selected songs in MP3 format.
He continues to buy between 40 and 50 CDs a month. "Artists should get paid for their work," he says.
The artists are beginning to benefit from his experimenting.
Two bands he heard on Mp3 blogs sounded to him as if their music should be played on WXPN, the University of Pennsylvania-owned public-radio station that is deep into singer-songwriters.
So if you hear LCD Soundsystem or The Cloud Room on the station, you know why. "It's really added to my knowledge of what's out there," he said.
As music blogs creep toward the mainstream - fed by record industry A & R types and supported by advertising - Warren is relishing the indie aspects.
"I'm not into the hype part of it yet," he says.
He gets that in his day job.
"A lof of these bloggers are not in the business. They are just fans of music. When a promo guy calls me and says 'We've just signed the greatest band in the world," I look at that with a lot of skepticism now. I jsut feel the real power is with the people. These are real people writing about great records, and there is something really wonderful about that."