Music Site BuzzNet Rolling Up Blogs? No, Says BuzzNet. Yes, Say Bloggers*

CNET's Caroline McCarthy interviews Buzznet CEO Tyler Goldman, who explains to her that even though his music/pop culture site looks a lot like a social network, it's not: It's a "social media community".

OK. Fair enough. One other thing Tyler wants to clear up: His site isn't looking to use the $25 million it just raised to go and buy a bunch of music blogs. But that's what a bunch of music bloggers think he's trying to do.

You can see why they might be confused. Tyler has bought music blog Stereogum, for something like $5 million dollars. And someone at Buzznet -- it's not clear who -- has been sending out notes like the one below (first published at The Daily Swarm) to various bloggers:

I just wanted to follow up. My name XXXXX XXXXX and I am contacting you in representation of Buzznet.com. Buzznet is the fastest growing social media site on the Internet “showing phenomenal growth——with traffic surges of 405%. With nearly 15,000,000 monthly uniques and 80,000,000 monthly page views Buzznet is a powerhouse of technological, programming, marketing and advertising sales strength.

As an established leader in media we have had tremendous success in helping our partners grow their respective brands (in seven months we have managed to take Just Jared from 7M to over 45M page views with a dramatic increase of revenue from high profile Fortune 500 advertisers.)

The reason I am contacting you is because I would like to provide you with a great opportunity in partnering with us. I feel you have a great site and a great brand that upholds the image Buzznet.com is trying to maintain. I think we can drive serious page-view growth for you.

Attached is an MNDA form. If you are interested fill it out and send it back to me then we can set up a phone conference. You can either email it back or fax it to XXX.XXX.XXXX. If you fax it email me first so I can grab it before it gets lost.

No pressure, but I hope you see this is a great opportunity.

To us that reads a bit like a potential acquisition query. Or more likely, an offer to join some sort of ad network. But Tyler, who says he's not exactly familiar with the letter, says Buzznet isn't interested in either type of deal. The Stereogum thing was one-off, he says. And "we're not interested in representing 5,10, 15 sites and selling their ads. That's not our business." Instead, he says, Buzznet wants to build -- you guessed it -- "communities".

The other version of the story: We're told that music bloggers kibitzing at sites like Elbows say that no one they know has taken Buzznet up on the offer described above, whatever that amounts to. We can't verify those discussions ourselves, because while the main part of the forum site is open, there are special music bloggers-only threads, and we don't know the secret handshake.

Either way, the result is the same: If you've been hoping that posting pans of Vampire Weekend and the like would somehow generate a big payout one day -- well, you're going to be disappointed.

See Also: Music Site Buzznet Raises $25 Million, Rolling Up More?