I agree with Chris that music bloggers make a much more promising audience for arguments about the value of persistent, well-designed urls, that bloggers. As those of us who are musicians and who work with them know, musicians are just not that — let’s see, what would be a polite word for it here? — ‘proactive’. The vast major are very unlikely to ever take any extraordinary effort to do something that helps themselves, no matter how easy and simple it might seem to us.

The only reason for joining an online service that will ever be convincing for musicians is peer pressure. And to overcome their overwhelming slothfulness, the peer pressure would have to be so great that it would probably need to come not only from their fellow musicians, but from a few tens of millions of their closest friends. And even then, the service must be so easy to use and understand that you’re really looking at a ‘lowest common denominator’ kind of offering. The only sites that can fulfill these criteria are gonna look a lot like MySpace or Facebook. To whatever extent these walled garden social networks become open and modifiable (and I think it’s a close call between Facebook and MySpace as they currently stand) it will be easier for people like us to offer the bands that use them services that take advantage of proper web architecture to help them spread their music.

Music bloggers, on the other hand, take linking as their main activity. This means that they’ve felt the frustration of trying to link to songs trapped in the frozen prison of the MySpace flash player; they’ve been bitten by the venomous snakes of temporary file hosts; they’ve bathed in the warm glow of increased PageRank from bigger bloggers ‘deep linking’ to the permalinks of their old posts; etc. All of these experiences make the bloggers valuable potential customers for services that offer to relieve the pain coming from the broken non-webish bits and expand the pleasure coming from link love and other webish virtues.