Crowdsourcing vs. blogging in music journalism

SXSW, the internationally renowned music trade show, officially kicks off the live music portion of the expanding festival tomorrow. It’s the one week of the year that Texas bests every other state in the union in the “holds more music geeks per square foot” contest.

In the ever-evolving realm of music journalism, media outlets are consistently trying to figure out the best way to maximize their coverage of something as massive as SXSW. So, I was slightly intrigued about AOL’s concept for tackling the issue of covering the thousands of bands playing SXSW head on. As paidContent explained [via The Daily Swarm]:

AOL is trying its most ambitious super-content project yet with freelance content site Seed.com: offering 2,000 $50 assignments on SXSW bands for its music site Spinner.com. New Seed programming director Saul Hansell sees it as the “perfect chance” to showcase reporting and journalism along with what Seed can do for sites within AOL (NYSE: AOL). The basics: Spinner and Seed are recruiting U.S. “reporters” to interview all 2,000 bands for a Q&A and bio in advance of the March Festival.

But, I stopped myself from enrolling in the experiment myself. Why? It’s not like I couldn’t use the extra cash. Hey, $50 for a quickie interview ain’t half bad, right?
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