Editorial Note: Our Direction for 2018

Thank you to everyone who supported us in 2017.  From people who purchased our book, read articles ranking blogs, enjoyed our features on new artists, or listened to our playlists, we enjoyed the eager participation from a variety of people.  If we open up our analytics, we are blown away by the variety of places people come from to hear the music that we share.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

You may be wondering what’s next for EarToTheGround Music.  We have some good news and some less good.  First of all, our metrics are up across the board.  We are seeing more submissions than ever.  In fact, we’re struggling to keep up with some commitments we made for coverage back in the FALL of 2017.  Yes, it’s that bad and we’re super sorry, but we’re working hard.  The other good news is that both our views and social shares are up, which helps us get more sponsored content and more interest overall.

On the less good news side, we are going to have to close up shop on our EarToTheGround Books site.  We were really enthusiastic upon launch, but people were not willing to pay the processing fee and, frankly, it takes so long to review books that we couldn’t afford to do it for free.  We’re going to stay true to our roots here and prioritize the music site for you all.

We’ve had hours and hours of conversations about how to grow the site.  Because neither of the editors are doing this full time, it can really be a lot of work to try to do around “real” jobs.  That said, this is a labor of love and we believe in our mission.  If you’ve never heard it, our mission is to help artists find great new fans and help fans find incredible emerging artists.

To get at this mission, we have a few pieces of news:

1. The New Music Friday feature was a lot of fun, but had gotten a bit cumbersome to keep up with the winners.  Instead, we’ll be posting 10-song playlists more than once a week.  The best way you can help us is to share these so that artists realize getting a feature on ETTG means a nice boost in plays!  It’s how you will find new music, too.
2. We want to keep writing features and interviews on the artists that people care about.  We mostly find those new acts through SubmitHub.com so if you know bands that would be a fit for our site we ask that you would send them there.
3. We go back and forth on it, but we’ve decided to keep the “free” submission option.  We think that it’s central to our mission to make the site accessible to emerging (which often means working or starting) musicians.  We want to make revenue (like any business) but we don’t want to do it at the expense of “starving artists.”
4. We are always looking for ideas for how we can make more money (ha! who isn’t?).  We would love feedback from you, our readers, for how we might offer a product or service for regular people, not just artists, as a way to keep our site going.  Would you pay for curated playlists?  Merchandise?  We’ve even talked about going the Patreon route.  We’d love to develop partnerships with music industry folks (gear, headphones, speakers, merch sellers, venues, etc.).  If you have ideas on this, we’d love to hear them.  Send ATTN: Greg to eartothegroundmusicblog@gmail.com.
5. Are you as obsessed about music as we are?  Do you have a passion for writing about music for little to no money?  Do we have a job for you!  If you’ll pardon my sarcasm, we really would love to add more writers to our rotation.  It is an unpaid position, but we can give early access to music and opportunities for clips.  If you’re interested in contributing an occasional article, email ATTN: Greg at eartothegroundmusicblog@gmailc.om.

Thanks so much for reading along.  Sorry that we don’t have any big announcements for changes or anything.  We’re just trying to keep the proverbial lights on here.  If you’re a PR person, thank you for allowing us to send your submissions through SubmitHub.  If you are a music fan, know that you are the reason we do what we do.  We hope you find incredible, life-changing music through the curations that we put together.

Lastly, if you’re not following us on our socials it would be great to have you do that.  Click ’em all!  And keep spinnin’ good tunes.

Soundcloud – https://soundcloud.com/eartothegroundmusic

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/EarToTheGround-Music-202243623164219/

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/user/eartothegroundmusic

Twitter – https://twitter.com/EarToThe_Ground

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/eartothegroundmusic/