If you ran the site, what would you do with it? I’m genuinely curious if anyone has any ideas that I haven’t tried or should do, baring in mind there is no money in our kitty and very little resource to do anything.
I’m actually thinking about just publishing 1 article a week and a few key reviews written more as columns. And to put the forum and archive of content, much more front and centre on the homepage. Maybe scrapping the website as is and just doing it on Medium. Focus more on a regular podcast with interviews and playlists.
I think long-reads on 10/15/20 year old albums would garner more interest than reviews of new stuff personally. I feel like a venn diagram of the demographic that digests music content in the form that DiS presents it and the demographic that loves new stuff are probably drifting apart somewhat and that appealing to 30something year old’s nostalgia would probably be more lucrative?
If you do keep the site going I’d recommend going down a longform route to differentiate the site from sites doing instantaneous reviews. More thought, less haste.
Would the podcast be cheaper to host than the full site?
Are print journalism/ reviews still dying?
I stopped visiting the main site when I changed my Chrome bookmark to come straight here, although I had stopped reading a lot of the content long before that.
Since we moved to the old forums I hardly go to the main DiS site anymore.
Since the new forum is so more user friendly and popular could that be a tool for reviews? Saving the expense of the old dedicated DiS server?
You could have a dedicated reviews sub forum that only mods can create posts in, but every one can comment on. For more detailed reviews you could just use a blog site with links from the forum. You could even embed youtube video reviews etc
It maybe more basic, but I’d interact more with it and it will be far easier to manage as well as cheaper.
I like this idea, and having the reviews in the same place as the forums means I’d be far more likely to read them. Will create more interaction / discussion
I’ve been thinking that we should start reviewing albums a month or more after release. Digest it properly. We often do this when everyone else live blogs Radiohead.
yup, some of the best music stuff I’ve read has been like this. One Week One Band have done some pretty great stuff on loads of artists. Chris Ott is another music writer who I really appreciate, though he is a bit too acidic at times!
I definitely think scrapping scores and writing reviews as columns would be a good direction. I really like the retrospectives and longreads too; it would be a shame to lose that side of things. That being said, I use the forums a lot more than the site, so maybe bringing the two closer together wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Did this with our podcast / monthly Soho Radio show already Mixcloud
Sadly I’ve not come up with a good format for the podcast and since Danielle moved to the evening slot it’s harder to get in the studio we were using.
Meanwhile hosting and producing a monthly live on Soho Radio was becoming a bit much atop everything else and often things didn’t work properly.
The big issue is finding a sponsor to justify the days and days investment of time, and building scale (which needs a marketing budget). We did the original podcast in 2006 and there was no competition. I still regret not moving in that direction back then.
Yeah, that’s the exact sort of thing I’d be inclined to read on here.
I think there’s so much potential for series of long-reads contextualising classic/favourite albums within the discographies of artists and to explore their impact etc
I think the piece of music writing I’ve enjoyed most in the last god knows how long was a piece on Pitchfork about the impact of 808s & Heartbreaks despite its reception at the time. I’m sure there is scope for loads and loads and loads of really interesting pieces along those lines or even themed seasons of pieces etc