The Pop Cop

Last week, one of Scotland’s finest and most highly respected music blogs vanished.

The Pop Cop, before its untimely demise, introduced me to some great new music. The Pop Cop picked up on bands that I'd love to say I picked up on myself first, but usually didn't. The Pop Cop informed me of a lot of Scotland-specific music news that I wouldn’t have got as quickly or as readily elsewhere. The Pop Cop was, no offence to the rest, my favourite.

But given the combination of the music industry’s bizarre, self-mutilating behaviour, some misunderstandings, and the rather brutal handling of things by the blog hosting service (sorry Blogger, you know I love you, etc.), The Pop Cop wasn’t rewarded for his awesomeness and his band plugging finesse. No. He was shut down.

Extra interestingly, the straw that broke the camel's back – or exceeded the arbitrary limit set by Blogger of complaints for linking to copyrighted material – was a complaint that didn't even point towards anything in particular.

So anyway, there's not really much point in me droning on about it, pulling the situation apart, or anything else, because you can read about it for yourself.

Read about The Pop Cop's unfortunate situation

I think it's quite obvious that the decision to pull the plug on The Pop Cop was pretty daft. It's also pretty poor form that Blogger are apparently ignoring the situation and not offering the guy who ran the blog to get access to his account to at least recover three years of work and take it somewhere else.

But mostly I think it highlights the bigger issue – that the music industry needs to sort its game out. They want people to listen to music, buy records, go to shows, etc. Yes? Music blogs want to help people find bands they like to do all those things. Yes? So we're striving towards the same thing. Yes? Can we be friends then?

Anyway, I could ramble for hours. In fact, I have an unpublished blog about the even broader issue of mp3 downloading that I may wheel out soon, too.

But for now, I hope you'll support The Pop Cop in his plight.