Lucas — I guess I was (somewhat glibly) trying to address both forms of scale. On the aggregation of many small non-infringing music blogs side, you know the strong experience I recently had with the industry’s attitude towards aggregation. I don’t think that the original blogs having permission would affect the industry’s attitude towards aggregators. A site allowing easy access to search for and hear music in a single place would be a potentially substituting use for the industry’s actual products and hence a big problem for them (and one they’d have a pretty solid legal basis under current frameworks to shut down, since the kind of single-use license you’re talking about wouldn’t be transferrable).

The other potential kind of scale I was addressing was the possibility of a single blog getting so big that it would serve as a kind of broadcast medium in itself. Pitchfork is somewhat close to this level. I have a hard time imagining a site in that model acting as an effective distribution mechanism.