Interview by Domingo with Jason Cranwell of Scottish Music Blog The Pop Cop about the Music Alliance Pact @ Spin Earth TV
Domingo: So when did you come up with the idea for MAP? How did all this come about? The collective voice as a whole says a lot, and it's so diversified.
Jason: I came up with the concept of MAP in August 2008 and two months later the first one was published with 12 countries/blogs. Since then it has almost tripled in size and is currently represented in seven continents. The mushrooming popularity of blogs, MySpace, YouTube etc. means there's an intimidating volume of new music out there - therefore, trying to discover which of it is actually good is becoming harder than ever. The logic behind MAP is that because each individual blog's regular readers would usually download and listen to the author's recommended songs, they would be more likely to download the MAP songs too, even though their source was another blog entirely. You only have to look at bands like Sigur Rós to realize that there is so much good music out there that doesn't come from the over-exposed territories of Britain and North America, so I thought MAP would be the perfect way to unite a global audience.
Domingo: Amazing. Now an idea is one thing, and implementing is another. How did the initial logistics come together? Did you want to pull your hair out at any point? If you don't mind me asking, who were the original 12?
Jason: MAP is a logistical nightmare! We have 35 blogs and bloggers and unfortunately not everyone has English as their native language so there's a lot of broken English to be deciphered, plus I then have to edit all the text to a standardized style (e.g. removing apostrophes from album titles, capitalizing song titles). I also have to download each individual song and check that they've correctly filled in the tag information so that the details of the song show up on audio players - if that's not done I have to e-mail the bloggers concerned and ask them to fix it. In terms of putting it together from the start I just e-mailed blogs I liked, explained the concept and asked if they wanted to get involved. Pretty much all my first choices said yes. Here's a link to the first MAP and the initial 12 blogs....
One of them was the I love Icelandic music Blog
Source: The Pop Cop - Music Alliance Pact @ Spin Earth TV
More MAP @ Spin Earth TV here
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