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IdolatorWatch: It’s Alive!!!

The day that snarky music-loving geeks have been waiting for has finally arrived.

After much hype and speculation (led by us), this morning the overlords at Gawker Media have finally pulled the password-protected curtain back and unveiled Idolator.

The launch is accompanied by the Gawker standard-issue snark, largely directed at the very music blogging community that Idolator is joining:

For all the talk about the blogs as an anecdote to the increasingly dunderheaded major-labels, their enthusiasm sometimes does more harm than good, and many of their championed bands suffer from the association. Sure, the Arcade Fire and the Arctic Monkeys may have helped Other Music and Insound stay in business, but where are the overhyped would-be phenoms of the months past–your Nine Black Alps, your Mellowdrones? Most of them are stuck in a half.com limbo, the victims of not only insanely inflated expectations, but also of a cruelly cyclical mentality that builds bands up, before just as quickly knocking ‘em down.

More from the introductory post after the jump; more coverage of the newness that is Idolator soon to follow.

Take the most recent victim of Internet buzz, a 20-year-old gypsy-folk wunderkind named Zach Condon, a.k.a. Beirut. After his perfectly pleasant debut album earned a rave Pitchfork review, it flew through the blogosphere, and Condon was overwhelmed with next-big-thing kudos, even breaking through the mainstream press with a New York Magazine profile. Soon enough, he was playing in front of a packed crowd at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park Pool. And you know what? He was just okay–nowhere as transcendent as people were expecting, and not a disaster, either. But his so-so performance garnered tsk-tsking from bloggers in the audience, who were beginning to wonder if he was worthy of all this attention–despite the fact that many of them had been hyping him to begin with.

This is where Idolator comes in. We’re as obsessed with the music world as we are with the machinations behind it, and we’ll cover the people who are manufacturing the latest band buzz, whether it’s an old-guard standby (Rolling Stone), an absurdly powerful new-media turk (Pitchfork), or an agenda-pimping blogger (take your pick).

Of course, being music lovers ourselves, we also want to steer you in the direction of a good song or artist, which we’ll do every day. We aim to be discerning, but not snobby. And every time we introduce you to a new artist, we promise to wait at least three months before starting our own backlash against them.

This entry was posted by Kyle Bunch on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 11:16 am and is filed under Gawker Media, Idolator, Media, Nick Denton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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