I’m not trying to go all 99% on you. I’m a middle-class Jew: worst case scenario, I run out of money and go live with my parents for a while, get depressed and apply to law school. But if you’re reading this in your RSS feed, you should know that you’re one of 1,500 or so people who do so every day and have for years. I don’t make a dime off of you and I never have. Advertising on the site, and here’s a truth-bomb, has never been more than $200 in a month, and that was probably the best month in Rawkblog history. I do Rawkblog because I love it. That’s not going to change. But it’s important to me to do it because someone should be writing about music — actually writing and thinking about it — and doing so without deadlines and wordcounts and advertiser and publicist pressure and music festivals to book and all the things that made you start reading blogs in the first place.

Look, music blogs are dying. We were cool from like, 2005-2007, which means we’re well past our expiration date and the traffic reflects this. Most of the better longform writers quit years ago. A handful of blogs, mostly on Tumblr, are still growing, but let’s be honest: those aren’t actually blogs, and I say that with the utmost respect possible. They’re just feeds that post MP3s and Polaroids and Instagram photos and tell you when the band’s new album is coming out, and while I’m happy to have their participation and recommendations, when Yvynyl writes a wonderful multi-paragraph piece like this, it’s like watching the goddamn sun burst through the sky after a year of rain. Sitting down to write something is hard! And people are getting their music from Facebook and Twitter and Spotify and YouTube, which is great, but without bloggers really digging through the digital crates, the best bands may not ever make it to your ears. If you went to SXSW or CMJ or even Coachella this year, you know there are too many bands and you have too little time to deal with figuring out who’s good, who’s bad and who’s Lana Del Rey, much less what makes those bands interesting. What their real stories are, not their bullshit cabin-in-the-woods press release. Who came before them. Who might come after.

It’s a shitty time for music journalism. It’s a shitty time for any journalism. The Times had a round of layoffs after I left and will reportedly have more shortly. There are a handful of dream jobs, but those, like Wall Street, are currently occupied. In this case, it’s by people who generally deserve them. (Hi, Nitsuh!) The Mercury Music Digital Record Club is my submission to the future. Ideally, it will go hand in hand with Rawkblog: you pay a few bucks a month (seriously, less than the cost of the banana walnut loaf you just ate at Starbucks while you waited for your holiday cup latte) and I send you amazing new music and mind-expanding classics on Spotify, making your weekly music discovery easy, alongside serious journalism — photos, interviews, news, reviews, everything Rawkblog ordinarily does and hopefully more of it — right here and in the weekly newsletter. One of my favorite sites, Put This On, did a Kickstarter project for its second season recently and raised over $68,000 in one go. PTO essentially told its readers that you should support the things you love; if you don’t, then they go away. It may have happened to your favorite record store already. It may be about to happen right here.

So try Mercury. Try it for free. For a month. If you hate it, you can cancel it. But you’re here, right? You know you won’t. Let’s make this happen together. Otherwise, I’m going to tweet the shit out of those law school applications.

Spotify, the latest potential savior of the music industry, finally made it to the U.S. yesterday. I’m really enjoying it so far. As a collector of somewhat obscure music, it’s not going to replace my MP3s and iTunes/iPod library anytime soon, but it looks like the easiest possible way for me to 1) check in on mainstream pop that I wouldn’t bother pirating, much less pay for and 2) make streaming playlists without worrying about track legality, which will be nice for end-of-year lists, etc.

It’s got some gaps as of today: no Drag City, as far as I can tell, and weirdly, only the first Chad VanGaalen album. And no High Highs, which are songs that have only come out on Bandcamp anyway. If it can somehow keep pace with the myriad world of new indie tracks, it’ll be especially impressive (and useful) — and ethically, it feels nice to know that you listening to something means the band is making a little more money, even if you’ve actually paid for the album already. (I see you, kid in the back.)

It’ll be interesting to see if it does what Rdio, Rhapsody, etc. couldn’t and gains a serious following. For whatever reason, it seems to have that important air of cool about it, which could push it over the top — that and everyone finally has a smartphone. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ve made a Rawkblog Ongoing 2K11 Jams playlist: assuming people are interested, I’ll update it every week or two. I also have some invites to share, though you’ll have to sign up via Klout. (Sorry.)

1) Present a sort of Rawkblog taste state of the union: These are bands I don’t like. I’m not going to be writing about them on Rawkblog. As a Rawkblog reader, I’d like you to be aware of this, in case you were expecting paragraphs of gushing about Teen Inc. or whatever. Consider it a full disclosure.

2) As a response to the orgasmic heights of drunken, Twitter-driven CMJ coverage. These bands may sound great in a tiny club at 2 a.m. after a day of free booze, but try listening to them on headphones.

3) To point out the obvious ridiculousness of multiple bands having “Teen” in their names. (Or “Sun” in their names.) This, to me, is funny — stringing them together is a joke, though the fact that none of them are very good is not. I also used the word special (in italics!) and mentioned the bands’ moms as a joke, to take some of the edge off of me listing a bunch of bands and saying they suck.

4) To cut through some of the general “Every new band is a buzz band!” bullshit of 2010. You don’t need to listen to everything. Most of these bands just don’t have much to offer: Even the best of them, which is probably Sun Airway, sound like pale imitations of better bands, and probably imitations of bands with records out this year! I’m not against imitation — I’m for quality. It doesn’t matter what recipe you use if you’ve baked a delicious meal; the bands I’ve listed are burnt vegan cupcakes.

5) Did I want to piss people off and get “mad hits?” Of course. Am I entitled to do this once a year after spending the other 250+ weekdays writing about bands nobody cares about that generate literally a couple of dozen Hype Machine hits? Of course.

That all said:

Re: not writing descriptions of every band: The whole point is that these are bands I think you can safely ignore. I’m asking the reader to trust me as a critic here. If you disagree with any of these selections, you already have your mind made up and don’t need me to explain to you how your taste is “wrong” or “bad.” This is the thing that, insanely, seems to have offended people the most — when I did the opposite, posting a list of nine great free albums the other day, nobody said, “Jesus Christ, Dave, why don’t you tell us why these are good?! This is so reckless!”

I think this points to a larger cultural issue in 2010, which is: bloggers are always looking for content. If you post a song every day, or five songs every day, some of those are going to be better than others and inevitably, some of them are just not going to be very good. There is almost no negative writing on blogs, because it’s generally not very productive — I’d rather spend my time writing about why I think a band is great and worthy of your time than doing the opposite, which seems pointless, and why I chose to do a list like this rather than write something on every single one of these bands — so its very existence, almost regardless of what bands I chose, inspires backlash. Why? I guess it’s seen as a threat — to taste, to other blogs, to something.

So there it is. Send back more deep thoughts.

Let’s chat. Jumping off points: Witch house: a real genre? NME’s top 50 new bands list: Do we need a list of 50 new bands? Can we have a list of five good ones instead? Have you totally forgotten about Spoon and Beach House? Has there been a single truly mind-blowing album this year? What pre-2010 jams are you listening to? How was your summer?

(Related: Is our commenting software OK? Should we switch to something else? Share yr feelings.)

We were mostly so excited with what we were writing that we didn’t have a chance to talk about old metal. In any case, I think his knowledge of metal lore is deeper even than mine, so I was out of my league.

In related news, that’s really the new Weezer album cover, and yes, it’s almost certainly going to be the best thing about the album. #Hurley4eva

Previously: First Look: Paramore – Brand New Eyes