Audio India is publishing a series of interviews with music bloggers- in the first post, Jo interviews Murali Venkatraman:

You were among the very first few people from India who started music blogging. Can you write about how it has helped you compared to your musical life before music blogging?

The most beautiful aspects of a music blog are the one to one conversations with audience, their opinions and encouragement. Here as an artist, I had the chance to understand how different people viewed my art unbiasedly since most of the visitors were random and unrelated to start with. What however I did not anticipate was the avalanche of musicians interested in a similar concept and coming together for greater efforts. Blogswara album and aavarthana concerts were two such things. Musicblogging ensured that the musicians like me who were just spreading their wings on the web without much of a direction, would focus for efforts greater than just an individual karaoke rendition. It emphasized the importance of collaboration and also the need for critical evaluation from both the peers and the rest. It made me humbled and happy and taught me honest evaluation of my music and others’. In short, it helped me think about music more objectively without however losing the heart for the art itself.