While sharing music via e-mail is neither a new concept nor one unique to the Dartmouth community, a handful of Dartmouth students have made it their own hobby, repurposing BlitzMail in the spirit of popular music blogs. The resulting music Blitz lists are notable for their regularity and wide-reaching recipient lists as well as the growing trend they have formed in Dartmouth culture.
There are currently at least three students who maintain regular music Blitz lists, who each said they wished to remain anonymous for fear of legal consequences. One student a '10 male member of the Dodecaphonics who also plays with a campus band said he sees copyright issues as primarily a formality, although he understands the reasoning behind them.
"Music is made to be shared, and I think these [artists] will make money regardless of whether or not we're circulating their songs," he said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Two students a '10 member of Sigma Delta sorority and an '09 member of Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity who is now at the Thayer School of Engineering send out music blitzes on an almost-daily basis, save for a few scattered missed days. The '10 said she titles her blitzes with short, attention-grabbing phrases such as "whoa" or "omg," whereas the '09 has adopted the official title "Song of the Day," or "SOTD."
Both students said the Blitz lists originated as informal, occasional blitzes containing music sent to friends and Greek houses. The '10 started her list in Fall 2008, while the '09 started his this past Fall after he had graduated.
Since then, the blitzes have become entrenched in Dartmouth culture, as the size of their recipient lists has rapidly increased.
"I blitzed out to Sig Ep, the Frisbee list, pretty much all the lists I had and a lot of my friends," the '09 Sig Ep said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "I put it on Facebook and then whoever just said they wanted to be on it from there and got back to me, I put them on. Since then I've had people's friends who wanted to get on I probably don't know 20 percent of the list."
The '10 female echoed this sentiment, explaining that she does not personally know a significant number of her recipients.
The two music senders agree that there is a lot of overlap between their recipient lists, partly because of the students' similar tastes in music many of their blitzes contain at least one hip-hop song selection. Recently, the '10 female sent out a remix of Young Money's "Bedrock" by DJ Benzi for Valentine's Day, which she deemed "an appropriately themed song" for the occasion in the blitz.
The '09 said he sends out a slightly more varied selection of songs than the '10 Sigma Delt, with featured artists ranging from Kid Cudi to Elliott Smith. Still, the '09 acknowledged that he tends to stick with hip-hop and electronic music much of the time.
"It's very set to a few genres that I focus on," he said. "[But] I do try to mix it up. I don't like to send all hip-hop, or like a string of hip-hop, a string of electronic music."
Both the '10 female and the '09 said they find a lot of their music on blogs and through the use of blog engines like The Hype Machine, a web site that aggregates posts from music blogs across the Internet. According to the '10 female, she has 25 music blogs bookmarked on her computer. With access to so many music sources, the pair said they never run out of original mixes or songs to send.
"I read music blogs every day," the '10 female said. "So it's usually new stuff and I don't really care if other people are going to like it, [because] I do."
The '09 agreed, explaining the difficulty of satisfying all 200 recipients on his list. But judging from the large number of students who receive the music blitzes, and the fact that both lists are only growing in number, the songs sent out by these students have satisfied the senders' peers.
"I've only had one person drop the list, so it must be that people like it," the '09 said.
The '10 male has sent out his Song of the Week often abbreviated as SOTW since spring 2007.
"It was mostly the Dodecs and my close friends who were always asking me to send them music every day," the '10 Dodec said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "Freshman year I had a music library of 50,000 songs."
Unlike the senders of daily blitzes, who rely on the Internet for source material, the '10 male sends more soul and R&B songs from an older generation, which he pulls primarily from his own music library or receives as recommendations from friends. He said his favorites include Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder.
"I try to send out some rock too, but every so often I'll spice it up with classical music or world music or just something really obscure," the '10 male said. "I like sending out things from commercials or video games."
While the '10 male does not send out a daily song, he said he makes up for this decreased frequency in his range and depth. In addition to circulating a wide variety of songs, he includes commentary usually explaining his reasoning for choosing a track on each song that he sends. Occasionally, he designates a theme for his weekly message he recently sent out a blitz titled "SOTW: Tributes to Recent Events," which responded to the devastation in Haiti and the fire at Phi Delta Alpha fraternity.
The '10 Dodec said he sees room for improvement in the music blitz formula and would like to see SOTW recipients engage in a dialogue about the songs, rather than act simply as consumers of the MP3 files. For this reason, he said, he does not repress the recipient list of his e-mails.
All three authors of music Blitz lists said they hope to continue their services even after they leave Dartmouth. They also said they would like to see other students continue the tradition.
