If you can excite a three-month-old Scotch terrier, then you can probably excite the music blogosphere. But right now, for once, the Boy Who Cried Wolfmother is not shouting about the latest indie rock mayflies, but about a rather more incestuous internal matter.
Idolator, the new blog from Nick Denton's Gawker Media, has announced it will be launching an online rival to the Village Voice's legendary Pazz & Jop annual critics' poll.
A lot of bloggers have praised Idolator's chutzpah. Admittedly, most of Pazz & Jop's credibility drained away this year when the Voice sacked Robert Christgau, their most respected writer, who had run the poll since 1974. But this must be the first time that the internet has made such a direct attack on the towers of the Critical Establishment.
But while the internet may have done for Pazz & Jop it's unlikely to stop there -- next up is every single one of the "albums of the year" lists with which newsagents are glutted every December.
This is the Age of the Playlist. You don't read about an album in a newspaper, buy a physical copy, and go home to listen to it from beginning to end. You read about a song on a blog, download it from iTunes or Bleep, and listen to it on the bus, in between a dozen other songs from a dozen other artists.
And for certain genres, this a godsend. Most modern R&B albums contain a few red-hot club tracks floating in a slush of tepid balladry. For me, Nelly Furtado ruled 2006 - Promiscuous and Maneater are two of the greatest singles of the decade. You need them on your iPod. But I'd have a hard time recommending that you pay a tenner for Loose, the patchy LP they came on.
This also happens all the time in pop, hip-hop and dancehall. So if a magazine insists on summarising the year solely in terms of albums, then it's torn between either grudgingly endorsing releases that are mostly filler, or simply ignoring the maverick knockouts in favour of the dull-but-consistent.
The solution, of course, is to drop the list of albums and replace it with a list of songs. (Both Pazz & Jop and its infant rival Jackin' Pop have the latter as well as the former, but they haven't quite been brave enough yet to let it stand alone.) This would reflect how music is really consumed today. And it would also do wonders for national pride. With the baffling rise of bands like Kasabian, Razorlight and the Kooks, British indie rock is as moribund as it's ever been. All the real innovation is going in underground genres like dubstep and grime. But these scenes are largely pretty wary of the album format. So as long as this is seen as the only valid unit of artistic expression, they're never going to get the attention they deserve.
Print music journalism deserves to survive the blog onslaught. But until it hurls itself into the 21st century, it's going to struggle.
