Perhaps more than any other style of music, grime and dubstep have taken advantage, or taken the interest of cyber networks and internet denizens. Although plenty of the prose gets lost in detailed sociological critique or scene squabbles, a few get past that with tight commentary and (for those of us not on the East London pulse) an in to the limited run, super-limited availability dubplate culture with MP3 downloads.

36 year old Bristolian Nick Edwards runs one of the more enjoyable – Gutterbreakz. He’s not as immersed in grime/dubstep as some, but I find his eclectic take on it all more interesting than most of the purist bloggers. Originally a text blog, in recent months he’s made the shift to hosting dirty new breakbeat tracks and the odd mix set.

I’ve been keen to see just what makes people host MP3 music files for general access when it seems the mainstream record industry is so righteously against it. And alongside my recent interviews with Jace Clayton (DJ/Rupture) and Stuart Buchanan (Fat Planet), Edwards is focused on a niche sound, but his approach seems indicative of a wider pattern and it seemed like another corner of the puzzle.

Why did you start your blog and what did you hope to get out of it?

Don’t know exactly. Just inspired by other people doing it and thought I’d have a go. It’s a way to record all those random thoughts and feelings I get from music that I wouldn’t normally have an outlet to express. I started in August 2003, but the first year was kind of aimless. I didn’t really find my ‘direction’ until last year.

What decisions do you make when you’re thinking of hosting a song?

It depends. If it’s older material, especially forgotten/out of print stuff then I just go for it. With new releases I’m more careful. I’ve started ripping tracks at 96kbps – I don’t want the quality too high, because I don’t want to give away other people’s music. Or I might just host a two minute clip. I want to inspire people to buy the music that I think is good, rather than giving it away. Hosting mixes is another good way of getting people into good music without giving away full tracks. I’ve also started my Gutterbreakz FM thing, where I play all the music I’m currently into at 64kbps, with me chatting over the top.

What sort of feedback do you get? From public, labels, artists?

Generally favourable so far! Quite a few people leave comments at the blog or send me e-mails. It’s mainly other music fans, but occasionally artists or labels with get in touch. I have built up quite a few contacts from this.

How many unique visitors do you get to the site? How many return?

Around 10,000 a month. I think I have quite a few regular visitors, but I don’t monitor that too closely.

What’s the bandwidth like? Does it cost you a lot to keep the site up? Do you host your own music or just link to others?

Generally shifting between 50-70 gb a month. It costs me to have the server space to host the MP3s, but it’s pretty cheap. I almost always host myself, but will sometimes link to others, with acknowledgements.

What do you think about file-sharing, P2P and so on?

Having been a big P2P user in the past, I’ve now stopped completely. It is a good way to hear new music, but I don’t think it helps anyone in the industry particularly. Not that I care about the well being of the major labels – if they all went bankrupt tomorrow I wouldn’t give a damn. But if you’re into underground innovative music, you’ve got to support it by buying the releases, because these people are on the breadline. Actually P2P can still be good for getting hold of hard to find deleted/unreleased stuff, but I found that I wasn’t really listening to a lot of the stuff I was downloading – without having made a financial commitment you just take it for granted and your iPod gets full of MP3s you never get around to playing. You end up hoarding more music then you have time to listen to. Now I prefer to buy selectively and really appreciate the music.

(Check Nick Southall’s recent piece for Stylus on this topic.)

What do you think of the recent case in Australia, where mp3s4free.net went down for linking to music hosted elsewhere? Do you see any precedent for MP3 blogs in general?

Well it’s gonna happen. I’ve already seen an example of an MP3 blog being threatened with legal action. It’s only a matter of time before the big crackdown. Certain blogs like mine probably won’t be affected for a while because we’re not sharing the sort of music that the big publishers are concerned with. I’m pretty much out of the loop for now.

What do you think of the impact of technology on the music industry? Do you think it is set for a shakeup? Or will the current players get everything under control?

They always regain control. Power breeds more power. Enjoy the freedom while it lasts.

What do you think are the biggest issues at the moment?

I dunno really. I’m not on a crusade or anything. I just wanna get people into good music that they might not get a chance to hear otherwise. I’ll be interested to see how well the CD format holds up against downloads. I think its days might be numbered.

Are there any really radical options being put forward?

From my point of view (ie underground) there are two main options. Unsigned artists who just want people to hear their shit will be able to share it around easily enough on the Internet. I give loads of my own music away. There’s quite few netlabels (eg Tokyo Dawn) that offer the music completely free. It’s accepted now that none of us will make a living out of it anyway, so why not? Some people choose to go to the expense of releasing their music on vinyl, which is great – and if you like the tunes, go buy the record. What the mainstream industry chooses to do is their business. I really couldn’t give a shit.

Aside from the blog, what else do you do? Do you write elsewhere?

I have no professional involvement with the music industry. I work a normal job. Blogging is my hobby, along with DJing and making my own music. I sometimes guest at another blog, but that’s about it. I don’t really have any aspirations to write anywhere else. I’m quite happy where I am.

Listen to Guttah’s mixes and net radio segments at Bleepfiend, check him championing bleep’n'bass and chatting about everything from Fennesz to DJ Maxximus to Tricky Disco at the Guttah.

Every time I visited his Better Music shop in Canberra, local DJ and music technology brainiac D’Opus promised a 7″ slab of his-own funk was just around the corner. Second day back in Sydney I saw the hot new D’Opus & Roshambo CD single down at Elefant Traks’ studio in Enmore.

D’Opus is a great technician, he knows his way in, out, upside and beside all his equipment and there’s no doubt the production on this 12 minute debut is tight. Heavy syncopated breaks and warm drumbeats reverberate through my speakers, D’Opus’s cuts colour the grooves, plenty of MPC magic, plus rhymes from local hip hop head and radio presenter Roshambo (there’s even a shoutout to his show Holy Calamity and co-host Altree). Being from Canberra, Koolism is a big influence. And I mean big. Ro’s style has a bit of a handful of MCs – say Adelaide rapper Quro – but it’s almost all Hau, it’s in the commanding presence, the sense of humour and definitely the delivery. The beats too – you know the kind of syncopated hip hop that Danielsan’s perfected, though it lacks the Polynesian carnival Dan sqeezes into Koolism cuts.

The first tracks ‘Hotels on Mayfair’ and ‘The Question’ are pretty well developed, broken hip hop and big party breaks and Roshambo getting tight lyrically – I can see them picked up by a handful of Australian hip hop labels. But that’s not to say it’s great. The package isn’t finished – Roshambo’s rhymes could do with more work (though his delivery is pretty damn confident) and a little quality control (last track ‘Girls’ is awful). And even though D’Opus’s beats are already pretty adventurous and definitely effective, it’ll be good to see him really grow into his own sound.

Still, pretty impressive for a debut self-released single.

D’Opus took time off from DJing to get the album together – it’s set to come out before too long with Roshambo MCing on a handful of tracks, guest MCs on another couple of tracks and a few instrumentals. The single is really just promo, plus there’ll be a small run (300) of 7″ singles and a few gigs to promote the release.

Just got back to Sydney and Popfrenzy seem to be doing the right thing all round. I dropped around to their cosy little record retailing boudoir in Surry Hills, which they’ve confirmed will host to a Smog instore next week. Awesome. I’m looking forward to seeing Newsom too, people say that her music makes even more sense live. She has a voice that can be difficult to listen to, but it usually only takes me a couple of verses to get caught up in her words and sounds.

Plus there’s a music trivia night called Dangerous Minds happening at the club (Chequers @ the Mandarin) on Friday. Damn, music and trivia. Who else is in?

Ripping its way around the net several years ago, the Gold Teeth Thief mix was the first challenger to Coldcut’s 70 Minutes of Madness crown and its raucous melange reacted fiercely against the fake rules of DJing, the artificial boundaries saying what music you can/can’t play in different environments and how to put that music together. But unlike Coldcut’s studio-recorded set, Rupture recorded his live on three turntables.

Like a few of my favourite DJs – Optimo, Mark N, Bec Paton, Glimmer Twins, even Certified Bananas – he sits somewhere between Simon Reynold’s two schools of music fan, neither strictly genreist or populist, instead, right where the best DJs should be, unwrapping music.

He tears through sets, cutting up tracks he obviously loves with complete irreverence. Soaring Middle Eastern voices ride nasty basslines, Crunk anthems bump against big time pop tunes and searing junglist breakbeats play host to chatting ragga MCs, somehow it all makes a global rhythmic sense that’s a hell of a long way from your local record shop’s World Music section.

As well as DJing, recording for labels including Tigerbeat6, Soul Jazz and his own Soot Records, Rupture, real name Jace Clayton, also runs one of the best MP3 blogs around, Mudd Up!. Covering grime to favela to screw to breakcore to Moroccan chants to whatever else – and always coupled with equally incisive readable commentary. In a world of music that just keeps getting wider, he’s becoming one of my favourite filters on it all. He’s been interviewed about music plenty of times, so I bounced him a handful of questions about technology, music and the future.

What decisions do you make when you’re thinking of hosting a song?

It has to be quality of course, and it also has to be useful – something that is not already digitized and floating around. 90% of the time, I only host music I own, and as far as I know, it’s music that tends not to be ripped – from vinyl, cassettes, CDs – it’s cool that blogs post mainstream commercial tunes that you can readily find on P2P networks, but Mudd Up! is more like … decentertainment. I like posting amazing songs by bands or artists people haven’t really heard of or are hard to get even for fans, like rips of expensive grime 12″s, or gems from African CD-Rs I get from Moroccan and Senegalese shops here in Spain. Part of the whole point is that hotness is everywhere, not just in the handful of tightly controlled music labels and media outlets who spend money to create demand.

What sort of feedback do you get?

Most people just download and don’t say anything! The public and artists who read regularly appreciate it though, I do get thank-you emails, often as basic as ‘thanks for posting this kind of music, it’s so hard to learn about where I live’. Plus folks understand that I’m sharing music I like & writing about it and all for free.

What do you think of the recent case in Australia, where mp3s4free.net went down for linking to music hosted elsewhere? Do you see any precedent for MP3 blogs in general?

That is completely absurd, both in terms of moral standards and ideological reasoning, and in terms of possibilities for enforcement. Making links to free music hosted in other countries illegal on Australian sites is like arresting fish for being wet.

Precedents, of course. Radio itself: it’s a freely accessible technology that allows people to broadcast & talk about music and lets people at home copy what they like. (the fact that taping from radio is seen as legal fair use, and mp3 copying is viewed as piracy is ludicrous– the legality of identical acts changes with the fidelity of the medium) of course radio’s structure is one transmitter and thousands of receivers: it’s free culture, but its top-down, controlled. Blogs spring up like weeds, their architecture is much closer to the P2P standard of thousands of transmitters and thousands of receivers.

What do you think of the impact of technology on the music industry? Do you think it is set for a shakeup? Or will the current players get everything under control?

What do you mean by ‘current players’? The music industry is a strange ecology populated by the audience/consumers, artists and producers, and incredibly dense layers of lawyers and distributors and managers and bureaucracy and whatnot in between.

Will fans keep on sharing and talking about music they love? yes.

Will labels keep trying to force a rapidly-aging business plan using legal arm-wringing? yes.

What do you think are the biggest issues at the moment?

Structural equality in the developing world. Access to drinkable water. AIDS in Africa… Oh you mean music? heh-heh. The big issue is no big issues.

Don’t get it twisted: MP3s and legality is not a big issue. Labels and lawyers are trying to push that notion into the public, but it’s hardly the case. There is no piracy crisis. Now’s the best time EVER to be a music fan. We have an unprecedented wealth of choices. Now is the best time EVER to be making music: the barriers to entry are at their lowest, you can record an album with an inexpensive PC running free open source linux software. Moreover, the ease of distribution is incredible. At least 80,000 people have downloaded my Gold Teeth Thief mix, I just put it online to share it with friends and it exploded exponentially.

There is, as always, a shocking amount of misguided corporate greed, but that’s nothing new. The obvious global consensus is that official CD prices are unreasonably high. The CD industry is _aided_ by the fact that people will get free MP3s of artists they would not otherwise hear of and get excited enough to pay exorbitant prices for the full audio CD. People sharing files is what people always have done Rampant bootlegging is market forces as work. Russian, China, India, and Africa: in all these countries it is easier to find a bootleg CD than a ‘real’ ‘official’ version. That is the cutting edge. RIAA-style litigation, Australia link case-style absurdities are almost surreal approaches to stem the tide.

Are there any really radical options being put forward?

The radical, extremist options are what is regularly put forward by the major labels and organizations like America’s RIAA. Trying to stop fans from sharing excerpts of music online – free advertising, unlike the millions of payola labels give to radios each year to ensure airplay – is radical. Trying to force consumers to still feel satisfied by spending $12-20 on a shiny plastic circle is radical.

Paid downloads are ridiculous as well. All this upheaval or evolution of whatever you wanna call it just marks an emphasis back on performance, back on realtime music. It has long been the case that most large bands earn more money by Selling T-Shirts than they do be playing shows, and virtually all musicians they earn more money by playing shows than they do my selling albums.

So it’s possible for bands to sell fewer CDs now but continue to grow in popularity. Whether people are buying or downloading your music, though, if you come to town and perform a lot of those people will pay to go to the show. So eventually record labels will focus more on ‘artist management’, with a special emphasis on cutting into the tour profits– which traditionally labels do not earn money from. Yeah, I think soon, you know, to sign with Matador (a fake indie owned by a major label) you´ll have to commit to giving away a percentage of your live profit to the label; or labels will force artists to use their in-house booking agents. It’s a negative view but I think labels will rapidly realize that live performances will ALWAYS be an income source, and although that is not their territory, it will be easier for them, in the long run, to go parasitic on artists that way.

The music industry is stunningly corrupt, by the way. Much more corrupt than drug cartels, and almost as corrupt as corporate interests lobbying government officials in Washington D.C.

If you haven’t heard the Gold Teeth Thief mix, download it immediately from Negrophonic complete with a full tracklisting. Mudd Up! is equally essential, you have to check his current piece on indie acts selling out, from Dabrye, P73 and Oval to Stereolab, Alias and M.I.A.