Boards
Would you rather... // Plus a bit of an update about DiS
A) A music website covered LOTS and LOTS of new music, regardless of whether we really loved any of it.
B) A site which was selective about presenting quality new music, alongside a mixture of great music? i.e. regardless whether they've released an album or several albums or are The Cure...
It seems that a lot of the main criticism aimed at DiS since I took back over is that we're covering less music. I'd be curious what camp most of you on the boards fall into (I'm guessing mostly category A, whereas the silent majority probably fall into B). Personally I feel there are so many other options and better ways to browse new music online than DiS (like thesixtyone or last.fm, etc) and my priority is bringing (elements of) these technologies into the DiS community.
Just to re-iterate, there are two (praps not obvious) reasons for this content volume downturn. Firstly, my aim has been to be more selective and in doing so we've not lost any traffic. However, due to people losing their jobs (or going travelling cus they've lost their jobs or due to workload going up because those around them losing their jobs) and the fact that we had 5 full-time staff writers this time last year, compared with now I have a couple of people doing 1 day a week (which, also due to the recession, advertising has massive dipped, so we aren't currently making enough to cover mine and Tom's salaries, hence me starting to write for places like the Sunday Times).
I admit, the volume of content has dropped a little in the past few weeks a touch, below what I'd like but I've been massively distracted by getting the new site ready (nearly there http://test.drownedinsound.com ). If people could lay off the constantly niggling and keep the faith, as things are starting to turn a corner. For starters, Mister Lukowski is back from travelling soon, we're partnering with Ether festival, Beggars Group are doing a big ad campaign on every page of the site, Rob Webb has a Radiohead week planned, Alex Tudor has an alt-country week planned, Sam Lewis is working on a folk(ish) week and there's something pretty special planned that we can't completely confirmed yet.
Hope this explains some stuff that a lot of you seem to be asking and any/all constructive criticism and suggestions are, as always, very welcome.
Sean