by SHANE SINNOTT

Yesterday, the online music opinion behemoth Pitchfork launched Altered Zones (alteredzones.com) in order to focus on “leftfield pop, experimental and home-recorded sounds.” It’s being billed as a “blog collective,” with editorial and content-producing duties being handled by a collective (I’m sick of this word already) culled from out-of-the-way music blogs. It’s hard to understand the purpose of Altered Zones though, aside from the obvious promotional one. Why don’t you just read the blogs that this work comes from?

Anyway, most interesting about this to me is that it signals an ever further shift away from the mainstream media for writing about music. More than almost anything on other subjects, blabbering about music took most readily to the blogs, and print music journalism is assuming the role of the dour old Paris Review guy, telling you why you like what you like. This is way more interesting, obviously, than what the new MGMT album sounds like, but it doesn’t seem to pay the bills anymore. My point: A co-editing gig at Altered Zones, for a lot of music bloggers, is the most desirable gig going, and the fact that good writers will seek career paths that never veer towards print means that pretty much everything is going towards all hell.

If you ever fret that one day you won’t be able to watch music videos on YouTube for free whenever you want, you can rest a little easier. Google was able to defeat a billion-dollar lawsuit from Viacom accusing the site of massive copyright infringement. The judge said that YouTube qualifies as a “safe harbour” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which basically means you’ll be able to watch and listen to stupid crap on the Internet without hassle for the rest of your life.

Finally, you could do worse than starting off your summer by getting into the new Wavves album, King of the Beach. Available online mid-July and on CD in August, it’s currently streaming in all its noise-pop glory over at bit.ly/ag00hp. Oh, and that Thurston Moore and Tortoise record-club project I was talking about a couple of weeks ago? They’re doing Yanni: bit.ly/dCL9BB.