Pigeons and Planes Has a Website Again

Music / mp3 blogs were one of the heights of the free and open internet. RSS, Hype Machine [0] (an aggregator), blog rolls, back links, etc, all allowed for both discovery and taste-making in an organic way that still let individuality shine through. New artists could gain visibility just by emailing a couple MP3’s. One could find a subset of blogs that matched one’s general taste and discover new artists every week.

Today’s world of algorithms and an endless sea of new music really pales in comparison. It’s completely soulless.

[0] - https://hypem.com/popular

Great to see this! P&P is one of the OG music blogs.

For context, I started music blogging in 2007 (my site is still around - Indie Shuffle - indieshuffle.com). I also started SubmitHub (submithub.com).

About this: "we’re not sure what a music website’s role is in 2026 and beyond".

I waffle between cynicism and optimism. Music blogs used to be major influencers. The rise of social media and streaming platforms squashed a lot of that, and our audiences have dwindled.

Meanwhile Spotify is increasingly pushing toward AI recommendations rather than human curation. I've heard rumor that their editorial team has been halved.

So, where do music blogs fit in? Will there be a resurgence in their audience? The cynic in me says "no". In general, blogs have gone out fashion, and users don't seem to have the patience to listen through a mountain of unknown music.

But there are still those diehard music lovers who do sift through the hundreds of thousands of daily new songs. And there needs to be a human touch to curation somewhere along the line - a space that blogs still fill.

I suppose at the end of the day I'm mostly just blogging for me. For the artists I share, there's some minor exposure - as well as SEO and AI ingestion. I don't think I can make or break an artist anymore - not like we used to back in 2010. But my blog is an extension of me, and I hope that for Jacob there's some similar upside.