I just bought the domain name progtronica.com

[geographyhorse]

Obviously, there's nothing there yet. But I'm thinking I'm going to create a space for the underrepresented progressive electronic collection of genres.

 

I know I'm not the only person attempting to create progressive electronic music. And a quick Google and Reddit search has brought it to my attention that people are looking for it. You know how it goes, where there's demand.... 

 

I'm thinking there will be a blog style front end. And I'm debating whether I will create a forum for the back end. If you guys have any ideas or suggestions, I'm all ears. 

 

I can say what this will not be. The site will not be a promotion service. Nor will I be doing reviews. If I think the music is good enough and fits, I'll link it and either write or copy/ paste a short blurb based on the artist's suggestions. The site is supposed to raise awareness, not be a place for reviews or promotion. Lastly, I am not starting a label (although, that's what a lot people call promotion these days 🤔). 

 

We will see what this ends up becoming. If it only attracts a small number of artists, the site may prove to the homebase for a collective. Otherwise, it'll most likely become a database of sorts. 

 

I'm gonna sit on the domain name a bit before I commit. 🙂

[john]

Hey

 

Great that you will be championing the genre!

 

A few points for consideration from an old hand....

 

Ask yourself why you are doing this. I have heard from many people who have followed similar missions, before, during and after their project. The answer will inform your decisions as you look at the options that present yourself.

 

For example:

 

If you simply want to support and promote the genre, you should consider the easiest way to sustainably achieve your goals and to best leverage connections and free (to you) assets. How can you make the biggest impact with your resources?
 

Firstly, why host audio? It’s expensive and there all sorts of rights issues. Better to use Soundcloud / Reverbnation / Soundcloud / YouTube. Also Spotify and Apple Music for that matter. Let’s face it none of us can compete with such sites, especially in niches.
 

Second, running community forums is time consuming, gets expensive and takes a lot of skills. Instead, why not find a friendly existing forum (cough cough cough) that you can set up a club or just help build the electronic community in? Or, set up a Facebook Group. There are pros and cons to both approaches, I am happy to talk through both. Existing communities have reach. You can put your message in front of more people when you leverage existing communities. Not just the people who are there but the people that can be reached, the quality of people, how you can filter them, the help you can get etc.
 

In this scenario, use your domain to run a pro electronic music blog, and curate playlists on Spotify, Soundcloud and Youtube. Playlists are excellent for promotion and as discussion point, and simply as music collections. Yet again you can do the playlists under your own accounts, or contribute to playlists run by a collective music blog (run by a group of contributors), or even a friendly neighbourhood music community (cough cough cough).

 

I started Songstuff with the mission to help educate musicians, songwriters, artists, to facilitate conversation and promote indie music. My primary motivation was to help. That to me is quite fulfilling. Particularly educating. The trouble is, back then there were very few music forums, very little good information available online. When I started working on the project Google was under a year old. I could already write software and was interested in learning web tech. My second motivation was to learn. I had no interest in building an empire (a common motivation for some). There simply were a lot less options. A lot. Now my motivations are similar, though I also want to help drive change in indie music to address the various issues I see that face indie musicians, but that is an extension of helping.

 

If you go the route where your website supports everything, including audio upload, you really need to put the legals in place, you need to consider the costs of hosting including data bandwidth, you will need a software platform that can cope. In facilitating discussion you could go a few routes. Hosting a forum takes a lot of work and can take an age to grow activity from nothing. Especially after initial support / interest from friends fades as it always does... just like music.
 

It’s worth having a think about how you plan to engage the electronic community. What will the hook be? Playlists is a good one, but there are other options.

 

I was talking to Steve Mueske recently about helping to rebuild the electronic music community within Songstuff. We used to have a really active Electronica community. I get there is a need for something. A few are active on Twitter, but while that might be an ideal platform to promote music, it’s a really, really, really bad idea to be using it to float experiments, works in progress and to give and get critiques. It mixes the world of fans/listeners with behind the scenes of music makers. Where a music maker hears an incomplete piece and thinks potential, non musicians just hear incomplete, not as good as a finished idea. When you look at the Electronica Twitter community it is 80% music makers and only a small core are active. Listeners are largely disengaged. Really, they should take the music making aspect out of Twitter, into a closed Facebook group, a dedicated forum or similar. Meanwhile they should use Twitter to build their fanbase. Genuine fans. Too many musicians like you so that you like them. It’s about bragging rights on numbers. That is why their audiences are largely disengaged.

 

Anyway, if you do build something I am happy to help to bounce ideas off. If you like the idea of my first option just say. If you want to be actively involved in reigniting electronic music on Songstuff, also give me a shout.

 

Just some food for thought. 

:)

[geographyhorse]

3 hours ago, john said:

Hey

 

Great that you will be championing the genre!

 

A few points for consideration from an old hand....

 

Ask yourself why you are doing this. I have heard from many people who have followed similar missions, before, during and after their project. The answer will inform your decisions as you look at the options that present yourself.

 

For example:

 

If you simply want to support and promote the genre, you should consider the easiest way to sustainably achieve your goals and to best leverage connections and free (to you) assets. How can you make the biggest impact with your resources?
 

Firstly, why host audio? It’s expensive and there all sorts of rights issues. Better to use Soundcloud / Reverbnation / Soundcloud / YouTube. Also Spotify and Apple Music for that matter. Let’s face it none of us can compete with such sites, especially in niches.
 

Second, running community forums is time consuming, gets expensive and takes a lot of skills. Instead, why not find a friendly existing forum (cough cough cough) that you can set up a club or just help build the electronic community in? Or, set up a Facebook Group. There are pros and cons to both approaches, I am happy to talk through both. Existing communities have reach. You can put your message in front of more people when you leverage existing communities. Not just the people who are there but the people that can be reached, the quality of people, how you can filter them, the help you can get etc.
 

In this scenario, use your domain to run a pro electronic music blog, and curate playlists on Spotify, Soundcloud and Youtube. Playlists are excellent for promotion and as discussion point, and simply as music collections. Yet again you can do the playlists under your own accounts, or contribute to playlists run by a collective music blog (run by a group of contributors), or even a friendly neighbourhood music community (cough cough cough).

 

I started Songstuff with the mission to help educate musicians, songwriters, artists, to facilitate conversation and promote indie music. My primary motivation was to help. That to me is quite fulfilling. Particularly educating. The trouble is, back then there were very few music forums, very little good information available online. When I started working on the project Google was under a year old. I could already write software and was interested in learning web tech. My second motivation was to learn. I had no interest in building an empire (a common motivation for some). There simply were a lot less options. A lot. Now my motivations are similar, though I also want to help drive change in indie music to address the various issues I see that face indie musicians, but that is an extension of helping.

 

If you go the route where your website supports everything, including audio upload, you really need to put the legals in place, you need to consider the costs of hosting including data bandwidth, you will need a software platform that can cope. In facilitating discussion you could go a few routes. Hosting a forum takes a lot of work and can take an age to grow activity from nothing. Especially after initial support / interest from friends fades as it always does... just like music.
 

It’s worth having a think about how you plan to engage the electronic community. What will the hook be? Playlists is a good one, but there are other options.

 

I was talking to Steve Mueske recently about helping to rebuild the electronic music community within Songstuff. We used to have a really active Electronica community. I get there is a need for something. A few are active on Twitter, but while that might be an ideal platform to promote music, it’s a really, really, really bad idea to be using it to float experiments, works in progress and to give and get critiques. It mixes the world of fans/listeners with behind the scenes of music makers. Where a music maker hears an incomplete piece and thinks potential, non musicians just hear incomplete, not as good as a finished idea. When you look at the Electronica Twitter community it is 80% music makers and only a small core are active. Listeners are largely disengaged. Really, they should take the music making aspect out of Twitter, into a closed Facebook group, a dedicated forum or similar. Meanwhile they should use Twitter to build their fanbase. Genuine fans. Too many musicians like you so that you like them. It’s about bragging rights on numbers. That is why their audiences are largely disengaged.

 

Anyway, if you do build something I am happy to help to bounce ideas off. If you like the idea of my first option just say. If you want to be actively involved in reigniting electronic music on Songstuff, also give me a shout.

 

Just some food for thought. 

These are some good points John. I may shy away from the forum idea. Conversations with creators should be closed to the public. I also dont intend to "host" files, I'll probably use links. Although, I do like the playlist idea. 

 

Musicians critiquing each other's work is great, but my goal is draw awareness to a niche, sub-genre of electronic music and give creators of that kind of music a place to present their work alongside similar artists. 

 

The problems musicians like Mueske and myself face when creating conceptually and theoretically dense electronic music is that when placed alongside the multitude of EDM flavored "popular" genres, we appear to be snarky, lone wolves creating music that is both out of touch with and even potentially condescending to more popular sub genres (atleast that's the sense I get with people's critique of prog) . 

 

Collecting this music into one place allows this growing sub-genre to appear more unified and substantial, even when the musicians are stylistically very different from each other. The things that bind us is a need for exploration, experimentation, and excellence. 

 

As I said, I noticed that there's potential fans looking for it. Why force them to dig through the depths of endless EDM artists on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YouTube and Reddit to find it? The goal is to create a reality where they can just type "progressive electronic," "electronic prog," "progtronica," "progwave," or something similar and BAM!, a site pops up having done the hard work for them. 

 

[john]

3 hours ago, geographyhorse said:

These are some good points John. I may shy away from the forum idea. Conversations with creators should be closed to the public. I also dont intend to "host" files, I'll probably use links. Although, I do like the playlist idea. 

 

Musicians critiquing each other's work is great, but my goal is draw awareness to a niche, sub-genre of electronic music and give creators of that kind of music a place to present their work alongside similar artists. 

 

The problems musicians like Mueske and myself face when creating conceptually and theoretically dense electronic music is that when placed alongside the multitude of EDM flavored "popular" genres, we appear to be snarky, lone wolves creating music that is both out of touch with and even potentially condescending to more popular sub genres (atleast that's the sense I get with people's critique of prog) . 

 

Collecting this music into one place allows this growing sub-genre to appear more unified and substantial, even when the musicians are stylistically very different from each other. The things that bind us is a need for exploration, experimentation, and excellence. 

 

As I said, I noticed that there's potential fans looking for it. Why force them to dig through the depths of endless EDM artists on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, YouTube and Reddit to find it? The goal is to create a reality where they can just type "progressive electronic," "electronic prog," "progtronica," "progwave," or something similar and BAM!, a site pops up having done the hard work for them. 

 

Awesome! Working collectively hand having champions is essential. Obviously that means outreach on social media and the blogosphere too. So think about creating a Twitter account for your new site, Instagram, Pinterest and a Facebook page, a YouTube Channel and a Spotify and Soundcloud account, with your site being where you drive people too. Often than means creating content, such as a playlist (the playlist has a cover image) on Spotify/Soundcloud/YouTube, you then create a blog post that embeds the playlist and also links to the Channel to host for the playlist account. The blog post is then shared onto Twitter and Facebook, the cover image for the playlist goes to Pinterest which links back to the blog entry. Instagram is different until you get to 10k followers.

 

Building this, if you want to do it justice, means being consistent. Just like being an artist, progress is about momentum, and that requires you to regularly inject activity just to keep momentum, but to very actively post to grow momentum. There are ways to do this.

 

It takes time to get into the flow. Initially effort is high and results will, after an initial burst, slow. As long as you expect this it will be ok... but importantly, if you never get consistent with activity (or someone else in your behalf) you will stay stuck at the very slow growth that you drop to after that initial burst. In fact, if you don’t at least post once a week, expect to see your engaged numbers drop off. Quoted followers means nothing. Active followers is everything. If they are not engaged they don’t amount to much.

 

Good to see you are doing this. If I can help, just ask.

[Cody]

I know quite a few people that make what you could label as progtronica and they face the same issues in any EDM groups you're describing, everyone thinks they're just pretentious assholes because they aren't making boom chika boom chika and actual explore some really in depth arrangements/timings.  Great idea!