Live Music Blogs

Since my passion is music, I decided to research blogs that review live music. When I googled "live music blogs" I expected the plethora of search results I received, but I had expected them to be better quality results. Most blogs I glanced over where either irrelevant to me or out of date. But there were three blogs that I decided to critique and it definitely opened my eyes about the possibilities of live music blogging.

http://livemusicblog.com/ 
Live Music Blog was the first website that caught my eye. The landing page was filled with pictures, and since I am a very visual learner and interpreter, I was automatically intrigued. It was very easy to browse this site and it's articles quickly, which is very important to me, as well. Since this particular blog reviews music from around the world, there were many articles that I could easily looked passed if the title or small picture didn't interest me. I really liked the voice the blog inflected, too. I think music has a laid-back appeal to it, and this blog definitely understood that. It used appropriate language that kept me reading and broke up the articles in such a way that you could easily find a part that was particularly interesting to you. Compared to the other blogs I read, this blog is definitely most geared towards my favorite genres of music. It is exactly the type of blog I would enjoy reading because, in my opinion, it incorporates all the most important aspects- easy navigation, pictures, flow down the page and appropriate voice. Even though not all the articles may be particularly interesting to me, I appreciate the variety of music they cover because I enjoying learning about new music too.


http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/live/ 
Yahoo!'s music blog was much less exciting than "Live Music Blog". From the first page I immediately knew this blog was much to "mainstream music" for my liking. On the right-side of the page was a column of "Most Popular Videos" which included every popular, overplayed radio single of the summer-- blehhhh. The articles on the landing page of this site were much larger than "Live Music Blog" and instead of seeing dozens of pictures and titles that were easy to glance through, this site had large previews of text from the articles that, in my opinion, took up too much space on the page. Scrolling down the page, I could only see one or two article titles/pictures/previews at a time, as apposed to 6-8 titles/pictures on the "Live Music Blog". One thing I did like about this blog was they also Incorporated video in there articles that would automatically start as your scrolled down the page. This would have been annoying if the sound started playing too, but they were muted, with the option to turn the sound on. After looking through this site more, I did find more appealing articles to glance through, but all-in-all I would say the music reviews in the blog were too mainstream for my interests.

http://blogs.artvoice.com/exitmusic/
ArtVoice is the local, Buffalo arts and entertainment guide. Their music blog, found on their site, is called "Exit Music." As expected, it covers local music events and news. Although I think this blog is a great local piece, it fails to catch my attention as easily as "Live Music Blog." It isn't fancy or even that creative with the layout, and could really be just a page about anything. I read this blog occasionally, as I find it is a good source for local music news, but I would love to see this page be improved with a better layout and navigation. It really is just a subset of the ArtVoice page but could be an independent site itself. I think our local music deserves the "fancy" web page with bright pictures, catchy titles and flawless navigation. Maybe I could do something about that...