But again blogs aren’t the same. That’s more of the tunnel vision, if you like genre X you might go read the blogs about it but you’re not going to go read a blog about a genre you don’t like or don’t know anything about. You could walk into a record store and hear anything, or be recommended anything. The web gives you what you’re looking for, the real world gives you what you didn’t even know existed.
I'm not sure that I agree, and I don't think that there is much of a difference. The people that play the records behind the counter at a record store pick whatever grabs their fancy that day, same as the guy that runs Nine Bullets. It's a person playing music that interests them.
But hey, I've never really been into that scene, and maybe that's me. During college, I worked as a deejay at a radio station that played independent music. A few of the other folks turned me on to some interesting stuff that I liked for a bit, but I've just not ever been impressed when people say, "here, listen to this."
“You could walk into a record store and hear anything, or be recommended anything”
Really? That seems like an outlandish claim. Personally, I’ve found them to be populated and operated by a severly limited array of types. You have hippies on one extreme and metal-heads on another, but they don’t seem all that different to me. Both are merely a different variety of nerd. And I may be stereotyping, but that’s what I find in those places. Various little nerd empires represented: from folk to headbanging to comic books to horror to anime even to something I respect, like classical.
It’s all very different yet the same. Tiny fiefdoms of alternative mainstreams.