Radio Guy Behind MP3 Blog

A radio man dips into music of the blogs

As program director of the influential WXPN-FM, Bruce Warren reaches an audience of 300,000 devoted fans a week. So why would he maintain a music blog where on a good day 50 people drop by?

Because when he goes home at night, he doesn't want to listen to Indigo Girls.

"While I respect what the Indigo Girls do, and they have a lot of fans, my favorite music tends to be edgier," he says.

Which is why when you visit Some Velvet Blog - http://somevelvetblog.blogspot.com - you're likely to read about the Transplants, El Presidente! or Scrabbel.

To say that the site, named after Lee Hazelwood's 1968 "Some Velvet Morning," has evolved is like saying the Beatles' music got more interesting. His first post, on Dec. 31, was a cut-and-paste of a 663-word Wall Street Journal report on record sales. No comments, no trackbacks, no nothing.

But Warren, 47, was experimenting. He knew he wanted in on the action because as a serious music head, he loved how other fans were discovering new music, writing about what moved them, and offering full-length songs for download.

At first Warren didn't post music, just links to Web sites. He had read about the recording industry's lawsuits against fans who shared music for downloading, and its efforts to stop the use of university servers as giant copying machines. He was cautious.

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