Altered Zones

There has been a DIY music explosion over the past 5 years which has been facilitated by cheaper recording technology and of course the rise of the blog. The blog format instantly gave a voice to anyone who wanted to be heard and along with that, anyone writing music who wanted to be heard.
Early music blogs were great places to check out sounds (for free) that you may not have been aware of before, or that your friends weren't talking about- you could mine bloggers' postings for new material that even the dude scoffing at your purchase from behind the counter at the indie record store down the street didn't know about. Now of course, the music blog niche has reached stratospeheric heights of popularity. Bloggers quit their day jobs to focus on their sites, hired teams of photographers, designers and writers (paid for by ad banners) to keep their tastes competitive. Some bloggers have started record labels, have Serius radio shows and have curated music festivals.

Pitchfork (keep your comments to yourself until the end of the presentation, please), in part due to their resources and pull within the indie community, is launching a "new sister site that will focus on leftfield pop, experimental, and home-recorded sounds" compiled regularly by a group of Pitchfork chosen bloggers.
Given Pitchfork's ability to create trends, there will be good and there will be bad to come out of this (if anything it will be interesting).  Let's see what is happening 6 months down the road...because that's like a decade in blog years, man.

Altered Zones.