AOL's Country Music Blog is New Kid on the Block

It's always interesting to me when large companies start their own blogs, regardless of whether or not the blog is actually *about* the company, or even clearly tied to the company.

Case in point: AOL.

The media giant just recently added another blog to their already growing online presence, this one being called Country Corner. The aim of the site revolves around the world of Country Music, and will include the kinds of things that you would see on any other music based site: Country Music news, interviews, videos, photos, etc. I do wonder though, since it will be backed by AOL (more specifically, AOL Music), what might that mean?

The fact that a large company like AOL will be running the Country Music blog means the ability to get much more "privileged" access to artists and news than your typical, individually run blog. I'd venture to say that a Country Music artist like Carrie Underwood or Kenny Chesney would be more willing to make an announcement on a blog that is associated with a larger company than they would on a lesser known site like "Joe Bob's Kuntry Blog". That is not necessarily a bad thing; it just means that when there's a giant out there, it can often make it difficult for more niche-based entities to be the ones to break stories.  But the non-corporate sites like Countryhound have the edge in so many other areas and usually do break news on the artists and events that the big giant just can't pay attention to.  

And really, the blog being highly visible underneath AOL's umbrella can mean that it turns more people on to Country Music, and allows fans to follow it to whatever degree they want to without having to scour the internet.

On the flip side, being that Country Corner is run by a division of AOL, I question what sort of bias the blog might have. While AOL doesn't have any partnerships with any Country Music record companies that I know of, that doesn't mean that there aren't any "interested parties" involved in this
endeavor.  Also, with AOL being traditionally a family-friendly site, how will the blog handle cases, albeit rare, when a Country Music artist does something risque? (Let's face it, Country folks tend to be good, but not perfect.)

My philosophy with a blog such as this is like my philosophy with news in general: you simply cannot rely on one site alone to tell you the whole story. If you want to be informed about any one topic, such as Country Music, you have to seek out that information from a variety of sources, and not expect to get everything you need from one place.

That being said, I personally will add Country Corner to my already growing list of Country Music blogs I follow, watch it for a few weeks, and then decide whether I want to continue to read it or not.

What you do, is entirely up to you.