i am starting a music blog
Hi there!
As you might have read in this posts title: I am starting a music blog, so… welcome to my substack, or rather: welcome to my first substack post!
For the past few years I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time (and also study time, let’s be honest) expanding my musical horizon. Not in a sense of making music - I don’t have enough patience for that. With expanding my musical horizon I basically mean I’ve been listening to a lot of music: new music, old music, genres which I love and genres which I had never even heard of before. I’ve been watching Youtube videos, read all kinds of articles/interviews/blogs and visited tons of live shows, festivals and club nights.
Being inspired by the people around me, I’ve found an inner motivation for my musical research in a way that I’ve never had for many other things. These people around me are my friends, a broad group of beautiful people with all different kinds of interests and full of varied music tastes. They inspire me, give me tonsssss of new music, unintentionally motivating me to find even more. It’s not a competition, it’s just so much fun!
Lately I’ve been thinking of ways of sharing the music I’ve been listening to. I exchange a lot of music with some of my friends on a daily basis, sending each other albums, songs, radioshows, et cetera via text messages. In a conversation I’ve had with Robert, he asked me if I didn’t feel like making a newsletter with my music finds, to share with other people. At first I refused… I felt like sharing music via a platform like Substack would be a bit pretentious, like I would force my personal opinion on other people and it might come off a bit as “you should all listen to what I listen to”. But after a few conversations about this, the realization came to me that me starting a blog could simply be a lot of fun for the people who actually want to read it.
Even if just two people would read my posts, I’d still love to put time and effort in to make it a nice read. Besides, it’s a perfect way for me to keep on challenging myself to discover new music, find tales that are worth telling and to simply be busy with some creative output. Writing this opening post is already getting me super excited :)
The concept of the blog will mostly be free of form. Even though returning items (like an ‘album of the week’ type beat category) can be something to look out to, it also puts a certain cage around the content that needs to be in the newsletter. Preferably I work with whatever I feel like at the moment. Expect songs, playlists, youtube-videos, articles, stories, albums, specials, anything. There might be returning formats, but there also might not be. If you have any suggestions, don’t hesitate to submit them!
So, if you read all the way up to here, feel free to join me on this new adventure! Subscribe to find my posts in your mailbox and pleaaaase contact me with any questions, comments or any music you find worth sharing with me, I’d love to make this an interactive journey.
Big hug to all of you <3
Jeroen Kroes