Frightened Rabbit's Scott Hutchison and Peenko's Lloyd Meredith

The unceasingly hospitable Olaf Furniss of Born To Be Wide fame invited me, Lloyd Meredith from Peenko, Matthew Young from Song, By Toad, Mike Gourlay from press promotions company Infected and Scott Hutchison from Frightened Rabbit to park ourselves on some black leather sofas at Edinburgh’s Electric Circus and offer some insight into the occasionally glamorous (!) and often misunderstood (?) world of music blogging.

Hopefully those who attended were entertained and/or enlightened for a couple of hours. For those who were too stingy to cough up a fiver, I’ve taken some of the best bits of Scott’s chat out of the context of a panel discussion and plonked them straight onto this very page… and voilà, I have a new blog post. See, told you it was easy.

Scott: “I tried to set up a blog about six months ago [see Cock Robin] and I’ve got two posts on it so far, so in terms of actually creating and doing anything like that I’m fairly shit. More often than not I’m at the other end of the blog, which is looking.

“The blogs I visit are probably mostly one person’s opinion on music who I trust and that’s why you would revisit because they become your pal who recommends good music to you who you don’t actually know.

“Throughout the years I’ve found that relationships via email or whatever with people who have blogs – as opposed to paper press and stuff like that – can get a lot more personal and a lot of these people have become friends. It’s not like you’re ever going to get that with a journalist with a capital ‘J’.

“There’s a blog called Music For Robots. I think they’re based in Los Angeles and there are three people who curate it. I’ve met a couple of those guys and I still keep sort of in touch. They put a demo of one of our songs [The Modern Leper] on their second mixtape. It was essentially the first thing we ever had pressed to CD. That was a massive thing for us.

“Apart from a select few, the main power of blogs is as a large body, for us as a band anyway. It’s aggregation. Weird things happen. You’ll go on The Hype Machine and see that that day we’ve actually been talked about more than Madonna. In lieu of actual record sales, The Hype Machine is a really good indication of how your band is doing.

“All of the first year was excitement through blogs. We visited certain cities [in America] specifically because blogs and message boards in that city were talking about us, so we knew that based on the internet – not on record sales because there were no records for sale at that point – we would get 25 people to come and see us in Chicago. And that made it worth going.

“More often than not, bloggers come to you rather than you go to them. The majority of times that we’ve been picked up has been from people we’ve not sent anything to. They’ve actually enjoyed discovering it for themselves. Bloggers are seekers. It has always been a pleasant surprise when someone’s got in touch and not even just to say, ‘Hey, do you want to thank me for including your band in the blog?’ – it’s, ‘Hello, I really like what you’re doing’ and that means a lot more.

“There’s really little point in pestering too much, especially bloggers because they’re doing it for the love of it – they’re not going to put something up for no reason. If they want to, they will. If they don’t, fuck ‘em.

“I could not give a fuck about people posting my music, or posting downloads for free. My income stream does not come from music sales. I would have a fucking issue with free concert tickets, though. And if anyone can ever work out a way to download a T-shirt I will have them.”

Frightened Rabbit – Old Old Fashioned (acoustic)

Frightened Rabbit – Learned Your Name

June 11, RockNess, Inverness-shire (tickets)