An Important Announcement From Viva La Mainstream

So with the help of reader Michael I was able to piece together why I've had so much trouble getting content to stay up on the blog. He found this article from prefixmag that tells the whole story. The long and short of it is that the RIAA and its European counterparts grabbed Blogger by the balls, and now Blogger has to comply with their wishes. From the looks of it, VLM has gotten it easy; yeah, posts are going down, but at least I had it coming. The comment section shows that folks who post mp3s with the band's permission are still getting crap from Blogger and the RIAA. Once again, something that could have been great is now getting set ablaze by the greedy rat bastards at the RIAA.

What this means for Viva La Mainstream: No, I'm not closing up shop. Just won't give the RIAA the pleasure. From the looks of it, it's gonna be tough continuing the way I have on Blogger. Over the next weeks and months I am going to begin archiving some of the better/more popular posts I've made over the last 18 months, so that they can be saved and posted somewhere else in the near future.

I also just registered a domain name at Wordpress, so if nothing else I might be headed there. More likely, I'm looking (with the help of fellow bloggers feeling the same troubles) at the notion of shelling out the cash to set up shop on my own. The soonest any of this would happen is early 2009, so for the time being I'm just going to tough it out as best I can here while I come up with a decent solution. Regardless of how this tale ends, I want to thank everyone who's ever found their way to this site, be it in search of a review or for an mp3 that the Hype Machine bookmarked, and Gina, who doesn't read this thing, but is indirectly the reason I got started on this blog (she told me in January of 2007 that I needed a hobby).

I'm going to try to post as much as possible in spite of the crackdown, but it probably won't be with the same frequency it was at the beginning of the year until the move to wherever is complete.

==TJ==