When I found the blog, approximately 3 months ago, I thought, probably for the first time in my life on the internet: “I’m not going to tell anyone. This will go down when too many people know. This cannot last long.” It lasted longer than expected.

I had often thought about converting my collection of jazz and improvised music to mp3. My collection consists mainly out of (about 700) audio cassettes and around 100 LPs. I did convert a few tapes, then decided it really took too much time.

This blog made it possible to collect in one go all the hard-bop and free jazz as mp3s, that I own on cassette or LP. All the Coltrane’s, Ornette’s, Cecil Taylor’s that I know by heart, and yes, also the ones I’d never heard.

The blog operated on the brink, I’d say. There was no reason to doubt the good intentions of the six posters. They uploaded vinyl-rips of long out of print LPs, music that was never released on CD. They made hard to get CDs available. They uploaded everything ever recorded by Andrew Hill, to share the love for the music. I enjoyed it, downloaded as long as it lasted, was surprised again and again that most uploaded files were downloaded only like 40 times over a period of a few weeks. Only once in a while I encountered a file that was downloaded 300 times (that would be a Miles Davis, or mainstream bop). Sometimes I downloaded a file that had not even been downloaded by someone else (that would be European free jazz). But, they did upload really a lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot: like basically everything of John Coltrane (I think I only did not see Expression and, funny enough, Live at Birdland).

The blog made me greedy. I put myself in the absurd position of downloading music and not listening to it. Saving for later. Knowing that audio cassettes last longer than harddisks. Knowing that the sound quality of most of my audio cassettes is superior to that of the mp3 files. It goes without saying that — also since I already ‘owned’ much of this music — there’s no chance that I would ever buy one of the CDs. It’s partly hoarding, partly downloading out of curiosity, to listen to once, maybe twice. Anyway, I already wrote about this issue in Metropolis M: http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/luisteren.html.

And then, two days ago, the blog went down. “The trolls found it”. Someone complained. The blog was hijacked, files deleted. Exactly what was bound to happen. What they knew was going to happen.

I have to give a talk on mp3-blogs on the SLSA conference in Amsterdam in june. So I think I will come back to this ‘case’.

And indeed, I will not tell where it continues. Not where the bots are listening too.