Scrolling Stone

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When Rolling Stone magazine celebrated its 1,000th issue last week with a three-dimensional cover designed to evoke the Beatles' iconic "Sgt. Pepper's" album cover, I couldn't help thinking how dispensable the old rag has become.

If I'm not staring at an airbrushed close-up of Britney Spears' bellybutton, then I'm slogging through a pseudo-gonzo essay on the rottenness of George W. Bush's war on terrorism, drugs or whatever.

I don't mean to pick only on Rolling Stone. The truth is, I don't bother with the magazine rack at all when I want to read about music.

The Web's eclectic network of independent, personally maintained music blogs is where I go to seek out the pulse of the industry, scout up-and-coming bands (or spectacularly awful ones, as is often the case) and find offbeat, informative commentary.

The most popular music blogs -- among them Music.For-Robots.com, SaidtheGramophone.com, Fluxblog.org, Stereogum.com, BrooklynVegan.com, and LargeHeartedBoy.com -- reach audiences of 12,000 or more daily. That may not sound like much in the context of magazine circulation, but the music blogosphere is young: Most of the sites were launched in the last four years and exist solely on word-of-mouth advertising.

And their impact can be viral.

"It seems that a lot of influential people in the press and the music industry keep tabs on the bigger music blogs and take some cues from them, so they're often at the start of a chain reaction that leads to large-scale buzz," says Fluxblog's Matthew Perpetua, a freelance writer in New York City.

"I definitely think that one of the big problems with the mainstream music press is that it's reactive," Mr. Perpetua, 26, continues. "The emphasis is on writing about what editorial thinks the readers want to read about as opposed to going out on a limb and writing about things that might not be well-known."

Music blogs are generally updated daily, putting them ahead of the print curve. One of their most immediate attractions is that they include MP3 files (mostly legal, sometimes bootlegged) of the songs they highlight, offering you audio pudding as proof. What's more, they offer visitors the space to add their own comments, favorable or otherwise.

In this sense, music blogs aren't merely digital replications of old media, literary-style music criticism like, say, the Webzine PitchforkMedia.com. Music blogs offer a more communal, technologically integrated music experience.