Read All About It

Through life's strange twists and online accessibility, my MA thesis, Does NME Even Know What a Music Blog Is?: The Rhetoric and Social Meaning of MP3 Blogs (see earlier post), is now available as a book published by VDM Publishing. That's the good news. The perhaps not-as-good news is the fact it is priced at $64 US - I have officially become a part of the artificially inflated academic book market. Currently, the only place where it actually appears to be in stock is on Amazon US and Target, and is listed, but not yet in stock on Amazon UK and Amazon Germany. I definitely don't intend to get rich from this, but at least it feels like I didn't sacrifice a chunk of my sanity for nothing, and I still feel the current technological climate of the music industry and its counterpart of music journalism is a fascinating area that needs far more exploration, academic and otherwise. It's exciting to think that I've contributed in some way to this global dialogue, especially since I couldn't find any secondary academic sources about MP3 blogs when I was researching. It's funny how, as a child, I always imagined my first published book would be a novel - then again, I also thought I'd grow up to be both a scientist and an artist.

At any rate, this will likely be the first and last time you'll find me tooting my own horn, so to speak. I'd much rather promote other people, which I suppose I did inadvertently in the book as I used numerous examples from MP3 blogs and their aggregators. However, as I tended to argue in the book, promoting others really comes down to some sort of self-promotion anyway. I'm ready to go back to the more imperceptible kind.

Inside the Electronic Revolution - Cabaret Voltaire

Oh! Vanity - Charlatans