Tag: clyde smith

Dear Diary: It’s a New Year!

It's early February, 2013, and I'm really feeling good about this New Year. I've explored a lot of possibilities over the last couple of years and seem to have found the right balance after many false starts.

Still writing for Hypebot about the music industry and, after almost a year and a half, I feel like I'm finally hitting my stride.

Putting Crowdfunding For Musicians on hold but that's one of the topics I cover for Hypebot so that feels just fine.

Relaunched All World Dance: Videos. Focusing on videos for now but I'm building an audience and have other content and information products that could follow. And it feels good to be involved with dance again even in such a limited manner.

I'm also working with an old musician friend who needs some help with his web presence and figuring out web marketing. Hopefully people will be hearing about that soon (if I do my job right!) and it's going to feed back into my music industry writing.

On the one hand, I'm helping a friend. On the other, I'm getting to test my current ideas about music marketing in the real world. Seems like a good thing all around!

And that's it for the moment, Dear Diary. Catch you later!

Looking Back on My Career as a Hip Hop Web Publisher, Pt. 1

I ran multiple hip hop related sites for the last five years before selling the two big ones and putting the others on hiatus.  A couple of these sites provided info services (press releases, new album reports).  Though the press release site was often disrespected by hip hop bloggers who would link to articles at other sites that were simply press releases with a writer's byline added, it got plenty of traffic and links and was one of the ones I sold.  The albums site rarely got linked to from people who I know were using the service but had a core following that kept up closely with the site.

Since shutting them down I've been hearing from folks who now realize that, under the new owners, the press release site will never be what it was and they now see that nothing like that exists anymore.  But the strongest response was to shutting down my new albums report whose core audience was devoted but never linked out.   That lack of links and acknowledgement was part of the problem keeping it smaller than it should have been and limiting possible income so that I was doing that one for less than $1 an hour by the end!

As I debated shutting that down, I got multiple comments and emails from people who thanked me and encouraged me to keep going but never really supported the site.  One guy even said he used it every week as a source of info for his site and praised it highly.  I searched his site for links to the albums report and found none at all.

I did get a couple of people saying they would link to me and help publicize the site but it was too little, too late.

I'm not saying these were invaluable services to the world but they were solid professional services for a niche audience that mostly took without giving.  At some level, it gives me a perverse pleasure to see their after the fact responses but mostly it makes me sad.  More importantly, it's a reminder to support and appreciate the things that one finds important or even simply useful in the world because when those things are gone, I'm starting to see that they're rarely replaced.