Monday, October 20, 2008

Metablog, With Music:
On Blogging, Bandwidth, and the Unlimited Archives of the Mind


pic courtesy mynavel.co.uk
I've tried to keep the metablogging to a minimum here at Cover Lay Down. I appreciate that people like to know about the man behind the curtain, but writing about technical difficulties smacks of navel-gazing narcissism: you come here for the writing and the music, not blogging about blogging. So if you're coming here for the music, welcome, and feel free to scroll to the end of the post for a few relevant tracks.

But a few of you have asked. And so, in a nutshell: after an incredible month of growth, my habit of keeping the archives eternally open to all comers, combined with a huge influx of new faces (thanks to Boing Boing, and our work with the Denison Witmer Covers Project), bumped me up against the next tier of file hosting cost just as my provider was about to close for the weekend. I regret this weekend's bandwidth max-out, and feel badly for every curious coverfan and folktracker who found his way here only to go away without the song.

But if this weekend's file outage was frustrating, it was also healthy. Being unable to blog this weekend, watching instead the sitetracker pick up echoes looking for something no longer there, forced me to confront some hard truths about what I do here, and why. It's time to pick our battles, folks. And before I do, I feel like I owe my loyal readers some sort of explanation.

You see, like many bloggers, I've come to think of the blog as part of something bigger, something more community-minded and interactive, than just me sitting down in the kitchen, late at night when the kids are in bed, and trying to make sense of just one thing at a time. This, of course, is pure egoism: as a regular reader of over fifty music blogs myself, I know that while such a tone of collaboration is sometimes welcoming, it is also a collusive fiction, a consensual construct. But it is nonetheless true that, as a blogger, I am no more or less a part of the ongoing conversation as every fan that wears the T-shirt, every artist that is truly excited about their review, every label rep that reaches out with a handwritten note. From those perspectives, I am part of their circle, just as they are part of mine.

Still, clearly, I can't be everything to everyone. Though I wish that every new reader could start her journey, if she so desired, by scouring the collection, catching up on what has become over a hundred posts and almost a thousand coversongs, it's hard to deny the strain this causes on our ability to provide constantly new content.

I could just go the ad route, or have a fund drive for that donate button there on the sidebar. I could dig deep, and upgrade past my current Business-class hosting solution to something called the Enterprise-level account, which sounds just big enough and expensive enough to have its own holodeck. But though I appreciate any and all support for the current cost of file-hosting, I don't really feel like I want to get bigger. I like thinking of myself as small, of being a hobbyist, an amateur in the proudest sense. I like being awed by musicians who know my name; I like being part of the crowd. If I have to choose, I'd rather walk the walk, and stay small, like folk itself.

So let us let our journey keep its beginning and end, and choose to live more in the present than the past. If we are to truly consider this an ongoing conversation, I think we need to be willing to let some baggage go, so that we can come to each idea fresh. And if that means letting the songs of older posts turn into ghosts, faint memories to accompany long-written text, then perhaps that is only right, given our ghost in the machine existence.

Over the next week or two, then, I'll be deleting older mp3s from the archives. I'm thinking I'll leave some posts up -- anything linked recently, a good set of the holiday music as the weather grows colder. I might even celebrate by featuring a few old favorites on a sidebar spot, right next to the elseblog posts I continue to crank out faithfully at collaborative theme-blog Star Maker Machine, where this week all song titles consist of an adjective and a noun, in that order. If you've got any favorite posts here on Cover Lay Down which you think merit inclusion in a greatest hits collection, to stay live into eternity, let me know.

But the bulk of the files will fade. Because providing two terabytes of bandwidth in one month is not a hobby anymore. It's not even an obsession. It's just not cost-effective. Our souls are more important.

All writing will remain, of course. The conversation grows, ever onward, exploring the mysteries of how people share song, and why, and how it changes the world. Through it, the music lives on, in new covers and in old recordings, in the hands of the people, where the folk belongs. Our ghosts echo in the ever-present hypemachine slipstream.

When I started here, I was thinking of words; I still struggle to listen with my heart. But if I had named this blog after a song, it might have been one of these.


Cover Lay Down will return to our regular schedule later this week. Coming soon: new covers from newcomers, and the year's first Christmas albums begin to hit the market.

16 comments:

Robin Marie said...

I love your blog, so I'm not at all surprised that everyone who discovers it does too!

It's always been an incredible learning experience for me, and I frequently listen to my "Josh" mix for days on end! Often you post a song or an artist I've overlooked or ignored and inspired me to give them a second chance. Many new favorite artists have come from your blog.

Thanks so much for doing what you do! As the older songs are removed I look forward to those that are to come!

Robin Marie

Anonymous said...

I came for the song choices, but I stayed for your words. One of the wonderful things about this blog is that you don't just throw up a selection of tenuously-linked mp3s, but the wonderful commentary that comes with each choice.

I think it's a good idea to get rid of the archives if it keeps you posting new stuff, and I look forward to what is to come.

FiL said...

It's pretty common for music blogs to remove old mp3s, so I for one have no problem with you doing this, especially if it means that you can continue to do what you do so well. I love the music and your writing.

Anonymous said...

diito to the comments above. do what YOU need to do and we'll adapt.

Seonaid said...

I just found your blog recently, and I'm one of those who caused your bandwidth spike.

At first, I saved off a few songs and kinda forgot about you. But then, a short while later, I listened, loved them, and came back for more.

I thought the numerous covers of the same song would be tedious, but as I downloaded more, I found that random shuffle seemed to put them in with just enough separation.

I was hooked. I even wrote a little program (not distributed, and now I'm very glad) that crawled your blog looking for "Artist: Song" MP3 links and downloading them. It was rather manual, I had to feed it a list of pages to crawl, but it quickly got me a broader selection.

And then I was very sorry when I found your bandwidth was crushed. It seemed you'd been here a while, and I never expected we greedy newcomers would cause you problems.

But I'm still a greedy newcomer, and I'm missing so much of the past. I haven't figured out how to download the new-style in-browser player songs you've replaced some (all?) past songs with.

I'd like to propose a solution. Take your past archive and make a .torrent out of it. You can post the torrent files here, they're very low bandwidth, and eventually those of us wild about what you've posted can share the bandwidth load. Every month, you can take that month's songs and make a new torrent and then turn off the old links and start seeding the torrent. A month later, you could stop seeding and the rest of us should be able to carry the load from there.

It would be a great way for new readers to get the back catalog from the blog, and relieve you of your bandwidth woes.

Thank you for your wonderful blog!

boyhowdy said...

That's quite a creative solution, Seonaid; the main concern I have is that it would only work if the archives were finite -- that is, if they were one set, which had already ended -- but perhaps there is a way to say "CLD archives, year one" and get away with planning on doing a new torrent every six months from there.

Let me mull it a week or three, and I'll see if I can't provide something useful, ok? In the meantime, don't take it personally -- I'm happy that you found us, and appreciate your attention and concrete, creative solutions.

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