Avant Music News

As you may have noticed, we have a new site.

Long, painful story boiled down: AMN was getting a lot of bot/spider/crawler traffic, as well as high-volume requests from various locations attempting index, download or copy the entire site.  My (now previous) hosting service had been complaining about this for over two weeks.  I spent about 35 hours over that period of time doing everything I could to reduce the load.  Load was reduced, but not to their satisfaction.  I was frustrated, losing sleep, getting behind at work, and not spending enough time with the family.  Ultimately, the problem the site was having was beyond my control.

So, I’ve moved the site to another provider that should be able to handle the load issues.  I hope.  I’m going to give it a couple of weeks here before I declare success.

In the mean time, there are a few features that we no longer have at AMN, and some new features to try out as well.  Despite the site being fully operational at this point, I’ll be working over the next few days to get a few minor things in order.

One difficulty that some of you may have is that you might be getting redirected to the old site.  This problem should go away over the next several days, as DNS records are propagated.  If you’re still having problems by the end of the week, drop me a line.

I appreciate your patience during the transition.

Last week we conducted a survey on whether AMN should include original content, such as reviews, interviews, profiles, opinion pieces, and/or other content.

The results of the survey were overwhelmingly in favor of doing so.

I’m encouraged by this feedback, and would like to starting including original content on a trial basis. However, I’m still trying to get my head around exactly how to do so. I’d like to provide high-quality writing, but in a such a way that the limited time that I can dedicate to this site does not cause an unnecessary bottleneck.

Quite a few responders indicated that they would like to contribute original content. If you were one of these people, please write me at mike@avantmusicnews.com. In your email, indicate what type of original content you’re interested in providing, and a writing sample if applicable. We can take it from there. This is a great opportunity for those of you who would like a creative outlet and an opportunity to be published on a site that is regularly read by about 1000 people who are into the avant / creative / weird music scenes.

Also, if you like doing album reviews, I get quite a few promo releases. I barely have the time to listen to these releases, much less write about them. If you’re interested in album reviews, I may be able to share these promos with you.

In any case, I’d like to thank everyone for the feedback. Much appreciation.

I’m putting AMN on hold for a few weeks to take care of some personal business. See you some time in August.

A few things going on this week. First, we surpassed 1000 fans on Facebook. That’s really neat, and not something I expected to happen so quickly. On a completely unrelated note, I will be at the Unbound Festival show tomorrow night in Chicago. Drop me a line if you’d like to say hi. On another unrelated and personal note, I completed law school this week and am graduating on Sunday. This marks the end of four years that, well, I thought would never end. Finally, probably due to finishing up, I am completely swamped with unread emails at the moment. Please bear with me, as it will take a few days to get through my overflowing inbox. Thanks.

Just a quick note to celebrate a momentous occasion. No, not the royal wedding.

Today is the eighth anniversary of AMN. With nearly 1000 likes on Facebook, over 500 Twitter followers, and tons of people sending in material, it has been a fun, if not overwhelming, existence.

I run this site mostly by myself, in my free time. I work, have a family, and have been taking evening courses the last few years. This means that as much as I’d like to interact more with all of you, I’m limited in that regard. Thanks for your patience in dealing with my terse responses to your emails, when I respond at all.

Change occurs slowly at AMN. One of the latest features I’ve added is the ability to “like” and comment on articles from Facebook. You’ll see this option on the AMN main page, as well as each article’s dedicated page. While we had had commenting in the past, I turned it off for the last couple of years due to hackers out there using it to gain control of the site. I’m hoping that this mechanism proves to be more workable.

That’s all. Enjoy.

Hi everyone.  At this time of year, we all get more than a little busy, myself included.

I’ve been receiving tons of material to look through, listen to, and so on over the last few weeks.  I’ve been giving priority to the timely matters (e.g., concert announcements and simple posts), and as a result have been neglecting a lot of other things.  Many of you submit music and I appreciate that and try to listen to all of it.  Nonetheless, I’m way behind.

My schedule will be clearing up after the 20th.  At that point (if not a little sooner), I suspect that I’ll have the time to catch up.  So please don’t be concerned if I’m slow to respond to email.  I’ll get there.

Thanks for the support.

Just recently, AMN achieved two rather arbitrary milestones: 400 followers on Twitter and 600 fans on Facebook.

I’m still amazed and pleased that so many people like weird music.

As of this morning, we attained out 500th fan on Facebook. I’ve always held a fair amount of skepticism for the ways in which to measure the popularity of a web page, such as Facebook fans, Twitter followers, page hits, and so on. However, given that AMN is focused on a topic that is almost by definition not popular, it is perhaps counterintuitive, yet vindicating, to know that at least 500 people have interest in the site.

Thanks again for the support.

On April 29th, 2003, I posted the first article on Avant Music News. 10,580 posts later, here we are.

For the most part, AMN is a one-person operation, and this one person works full time and is attending night school.

On a typical day, I get online early in the morning and sip my first cup of coffee while figuring out what to post on AMN. I read the emails and news-feed item submissions that have arrived overnight. I probably post around one article for every eight or so submitted. Thus, the 4-6 articles per day that I strive for at this site often requires culling through around 40 submissions per day. Throughout the day, as my schedule and Internet access allows, I will receive more submissions, and determine whether to post them immediately, save them for later consideration, or pass altogether.

Once I’ve decided to post an news article, I determine whether it is a short one-liner for Newsbits, or a more detailed piece that requires a dedicated article. Making this determination is often a judgment call based on factors including how well-known the artist / event is in the avant / creative music community, how many articles I’ve posted on similar events in the past, and how much time I have.

In many cases, the speed at which I get something posted depends directly on the organization of the information I receive. If a submission includes a link to an external site and a concise rundown of what is going on – e.g., tour dates, new reviews, new releases, etc., then it will probably be posted quickly. Otherwise, if I have to spend time formatting and editing the information, it could take me a day or two to get around to it.

I am also happy to receive promo copies of recordings, either via regular old mail or via a download site. However, it can take me days, weeks, or even longer to fully listen to such a submission. Thus, I’m usually backlogged in those matters. In fact, lately, I’ve been slipping further and further behind in all matters. I hope to catch up with some days off of work in the coming two weeks.

It is notoriously difficult to measure how big AMN has become. I run various traffic metrics on the site, but since many of you can read the site via the RSS feed or Facebook, I doubt any one number I pull out is accurate. But, I estimate that at least 300 people visit this site every day, and that there are about another 300 more casual readers.

So, one again, I’d like to thank everyone for the support and interest over the years. If anything, the amount of interest in this site and the amount of material that I could post proves that avant-garde music is alive and well all over the world, with performances somewhere every day and hundreds of new releases each year.

I’m looking forward to the next 365 days and beyond.

Happy March everyone. Here in Chicago, the snow is finally melting and I hope to see the grass again soon.

Just a few notes to keep you up to date on what’s new on Avant Music News.

• Our automated image / link software stopped working last week, and we didn’t become aware of a work-around until this morning. So we had a few “bare” posts recently with no images or additional links to related information. This should be fixed now.
• We recently wiped our user database clean with just a couple of exceptions. As always, we welcome people to write for AMN, and drop me a line if you’d like to. However, we had over 250 people in our database, and needed to clean out the inactive accounts. Sorry if this causes problems for anyone.
• The last few weeks have been extremely busy for me. The next few weeks promise more of the same. Thus, I’ve been slow at reading your emails and submissions. Please accept my apologies. I hope to catch up soon.

Thanks.