The Not-Pop Jukebox

For this, my 1,000th post, I thought I’d share some thoughts on what the heck I think I’ve been doing here for four years. To that end, I’ve been considering why I blog and music bloggers in general.

The entire point of blogging is to get your opinion in front of other people. That holds even more true for sites that offer reviews and recommendations. The reason for wanting to do that, however, varies widely.

For me, blogging about music is an outlet for a long-standing habit: telling people about the weird songs that I love. I hardly fancy myself a tastemaker (my recent joining of the Tastemaker X site notwithstanding). My motives are purely selfish.

I’m hardly angling to be influential in the music industry or to make a pile of money from selling my opinion to the most-popular bidder. Were I pursuing that angle this would be the All-Pop Jukebox, after all, wouldn’t it?

Here’s my reasoning: if I put the music I think is great out there and more people hear it more people will buy it. The more people that buy it the more encouraged (and financially able) the musicians I like will be to make more. With a modicum of luck, they’ll have noticed my humble efforts here and send it to me to share with you all and then around the circle goes again.

Lacking a circle of friends interested in every great new band I had just heard, I started posting here looking for feedback from like-minded fans and open-minded listeners. What I found was that few people give me much on the posts but that everywhere else I spend time on the web has turned into a place I find a few other rabid music lovers (except Google+, where I’ve found an entire community of hundreds of them). Their comments and recommendations in response have fueled The NPJ at least as much as my own findings over the years.

I may never be a big-name music blogger on an international scale and I’m certainly not ever going to make a living here. That’s just fine with me. You, my darlings, quiet though you are, keep me wanting to find and share more wonderful songs and artists and to keep digging into the ones I already own. I won’t lie and say it’s all for you but without readers and interaction, wherever it occurs, a blogger tends to get discouraged.

Much as I enjoy blabbing and gushing and occasionally chastising here at The NPJ I doubt I’d have kept on if you all hadn’t been willing and sometimes eager to tell me what you thought. For that I thank you, dears, and offer you one of my favorite songs of all time which I’ve been saving for just this occasion. If you’ve been around for more than a couple of posts you’ll be unsurprised at its being Oingo Boingo.

Try to Believe also counts a Jukebox Roots post, as it's one of the first songs I posted. I’ll shut up now and let you listen to the song. Tomorrow I’ll be back to my briefer self.