It’s Over Johnny (Stereogum Sale Confirmed)

April 1, 2008 by John Foster  Send to a Friend

Its over. The whole indie blogging thing had been mildly co-opted for quite sometime but the complete and utter lack of overhead had kept most of the big sites from needing to “sell out” their investment when most of what they had invested was their time and not cold hard cash (thank goodness the bank doesn’t come calling wanting back your time!) In the middle of all of this, the savvy internet reader has been able to enjoy the unfiltered viewpoint of scribes from around the globe and we have seen bands get record deals and sell out shows on blog-ability alone. It has been pretty nice actually. The caveat is that the influence these bands wield past you and I pecking away at our keyboards ultimately lives and dies on the content. There isn’t a radio playing the same damn song every hour until it is embedded in your head and there isn’t rich media of certain record labels and artists in your face at all times. The bloggers may be cozier with some labels over others - but that is usually a reflection of their tastes and not a financial arrangement. You have the closest thing to a truly honest opinion than you are likely to find in the music mass media.

Stereogum, founded by former VH-1 web monkey Scott Lapatine, had done a damn fine job of turning many of us on to new acts, all the while balancing artists both big and small in attracting traffic to his site. When I heard his site valued at 5 million recently I was a little shocked but not entirely surprised.

Now it is being confirmed that he has decided to cash in along with his two investors and has sold the site in total to social networking site BuzzNet. This follows reports that Buzznet had acquired Steve Case’s music network baby QLoud. BuzzNet’s announcement of 25 million in a new round of funding has allowed the purchases to slowly make the news. This is all fine of course. Good for Lapatine and Case (again) for seeing a return on their hard work.

Where things get sticky is when you see that millions of that funding has come from Interscope Records (if you can’t beat ‘em - buy ‘em.) When I went to BuzzNet to do a little research, the lead story/post/whatever was an Interscope artist lovefest as Gavin Rossdale discusses the music of Gwen Stefani.

Not a good sign for the future of unbiased reporting.

Which begs the question - when is someone going to give us here ay byt the chance to sell out? Oh - I mean “buy in.”

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