A Blog About Music

Musician's Blog

     I've received a lot of comments recently which, for a brand new blog, is pretty nice. Many of them included questions particularly about blogging itself. A lot of people seem to want my thoughts on blogging about music, or just setting up a blog in general, so I thought it would be a good idea to simply blog about it.

     I'll be frank: going into this I knew literally nothing about blogs. In fact, I was pretty unsure what exactly constituted a blog. Somewhat ironically, I ended up doing some research through other people's blogs in order to answer some of my questions: what is a blog? What makes a blog function? What are the good and the bad of blogging? What's right? What's wrong?

     After finding out what not to do, I figured out what I wanted out of blogging. There were two big aspects to this for me: I wanted to explore this type of media/literature as I see myself as an amateur writer as well as a musician, and then there's the fact that I wanted, in some small way other than tutoring, to spread ideas, facts, and passions about music. I never wanted money, fame, or anything along those lines. In fact, I didn't really want anything. I was looking to write casually about something I love in the off chance that at least one person might find it helpful. Also, I needed something free, as this is my first time blogging. With all of these things, Blogger really helped me out.

     A lot of those questions I mentioned earlier asked me about platforms, namely which I thought were good and which I thought were bad. Well, as I said before, up to about a couple months ago, I knew nothing about this sort of thing. Now, however, I can say that Blogger, the site I currently use (thus the ".blogspot.com" part of my site address), is extremely good- it's user friendly, free, and very insightful. I got some good ideas just from the easy-to-use layout templates. The website also gives me a lot of ways to customize my page as I go, which is good. There is, also, an option to have my own domain (no longer having ".blogspot" in my URL). This I would need to pay for, and while it isn't much, it's still something I won't do unless I ever find I need to.

     I hear a lot about WordPress as well, which I gather to be a popular blogging site like Blogger is. The only thing I know about WordPress is that there is a .com and a .org version of the service. The .com is apparently the free and more popular version. As to it's quality, I really cannot say.

     Blogging about music is harder than you might think. I find that I must speak as generally about subjects as I can (though I usually fail at this, especially as I show my bias towards sax players) and must avoid my own preferences to certain types of music. I see a lot of blogs where people fail to do these things and end up falling into a blog where they discuss only their own hate. Hate blogs, as I call them, are, in my opinion, massive failures- especially when they're about music. If you have a hate blog about music, it isn't fair to those people who like the music that you're publicly hating. There needs to be more respect of other people's preferences, even if they aren't your own.

     To that extent, I'm usually pretty good. I like a lot of different kinds of music, and those which I do not like, I keep my negative opinions to myself. Inevitably, though, liking a wide variety of music, and playing an equal amount of it, really helps with writing about it. Even when I'm super busy, which is more and more often these days, I still enjoy writing about music, even if what I have to write about isn't quite as thought provoking as some of my other posts.

     Finally, I have a couple points I'd like to make, in which case I hope many of you who have read my previous posts or were some of the ones to comment on I've Got You Covered are reading this. If you want to ask me a question, I've always said that you may in the comments below, or on the Facebook or even Twitter pages given (on web version only, I believe. I can't fix this problem, sorry), or even my email, which I provide occasionally (again, web version, sorry, sorry). To this extent, the comments you leave are generally anonymous, which is, of course, perfectly fine. However, this means  you probably don't get a notification if I respond to your questions (which I always do). That's why I urge you to email me with anything important you need or click "web version" at the bottom of the mobile version page for links to my contacts. If you provide any information for contact in your comment, make sure it's valid, as I've had some emails provided which were incorrect addresses.

     Anyhow, these are my thoughts on blogging and options for anyone interested. I'll continue Musician's Road for quite a while: I'm really just getting started. At this point, I have 1,171 page views. I'm very excited to have that many, as it far exceeds any of my previous expectations. Thank you all, and I'll be keeping in touch!

My email is shackspencer@gmail.com, for those of you who need it.

My line is always open for questions or comments.