Once upon a time, the flow of online new music content resembled a fairly impressive waterfall that gave off an encouraging roar of ideas and new sounds fed by individual music makers and appreciators. We bookmarked them. Later we followed their RSS feeds. When we look around today, it can feel like those many channels of commentary have more or less steadied into (main)streams of Facebook posts and Twitter links and SoundCloud files, but the volume has exponentially multiplied. Take your eyes and ears off it for a second, and this wall of ever-increasing thought and opinion looms like snow about to cut loose down the hillside. Yet we bravely wade in, anxious that we may be wasting time but too worried that we’ll miss something important to look away.
If you take a cruise through any of our index pages here on NewMusicBox, you’ll notice we’ve done a little restyling just in time for the new season. This fresh look will make mobile consumption of content a bit more friendly and hopefully offer you a better browsing experience both at home and while running between gigs. You’ll still find Counterstream Radio at the top of every page, the day’s birthday wishes in the content stream, and the same flow of original posts bringing you news and ideas from writers spanning the nation.
In addition, we’re going to mix in links to great content drawn from across the web. As users of any type of social media know only too well, the underlying design of these services is continually tweaked to help us better filter and sort through the firehose of online expression. Yet by adding so much machine to the curation chain, the result is imperfect (even if that is just how the internet works). Here at New Music USA, we have an office Slack channel devoted to sharing brilliant or otherwise thought-provoking content with fellow staffers as we come across it, just so no one misses out on an item worth consideration or a second look. Often these bits of news and discussion then flow out through our own social channels, to be bashed about in the content waves. Yet it’s never felt like quite enough. We wanted to more easily find this content again in the future and to make sure there was space to host conversation around current hot topics—especially when they related to our field concerns in ways that take us beyond an outside article’s surface.
So we are going to try some new ways to feature not only the same volume of original content here on the site but also great reading that we’ve discovered out in the wider world. See a post that you think warrants broader notice? Please do tip us off!
