How did Bell Orchestra sell out New York's Tonic recently? Blogs, of course. FoC Alec Hanley Bemis wrote a piece for the LA Weekly on "a clear shift from the era of airwaves to the era of iPods."

"The digital landscape has been laid; the critical apparatus necessary to govern its borders is settling into place. It’s a hierarchy of Web zines, MP3 blogs, podcasts, and message boards with peculiar names like Music for Robots, Coolfer, Stereogum, Brooklyn Vegan and Tracks Up the Tree. An artist can make or break a career via a thousand different sites that are insignificant on their own, but together quite powerful."

Alec continues to mark the beginning of the end of the music superstar by telling us larger-than-life acts are goners (Editor's note: Green Day has sold over four million copies of American Idiot in the U.S. alone, and labels' next stranglehold on pop culture will be through monied deals in product endorsement), pointing to the closure of rock stations (that were never going to play either the Arcade Fire nor its side project in the first place), and all but naming iTunes as Edgar Bronfman's much needed Northern Star (which is the only of the three I'd buy).

On the upside, he's dead on with his argument that the decentralization of music promotion means a thousand blogs can do the job of a payrolled publicist -- but at no cost and at a speed that's like a Santa Ana-fueled fire tearing through Southern California. The Arcade Fire played an impromptu 2am gig at Union Square the night before the Tonic Show. Just for fun. A blogger happened across the unlikely busking, and come morning a blog post was being hyperlinked and emailed across the Internet. Out came the Bell Orchestra connections, and by set time the show was Lower Manhattan's hot ticket of the evening.

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Isn't it ironic that Alec's article on blog power will be read in a city that has a surprisingly low per-capita rate of music blogs? For whatever reason, Los Angeles is behind the curve. I can't explain it, and locals I've asked can't explain it.