We’re calling it TVD 2.0.
Well, hello there. Thanks for popping by the new place. Here…pull up a seat and have a look about.
Since you’re here, I’m guessing you’ve been following to some degree the lil’ problems we’ve been having with Google and its Blogspot service. Oh sure, we started there and all seemed sorta fine until, well…you could wake up one morning and find that Google’s deleted your blog for perceived copyright infractions. Like what happened to our pal retromusicsnob. Or whiteray before him. Boom. Gone. Years of work and content.
So we thought we’d set up shop elsewhere and have been building this new home, nail by nail, since last summer.
But to be honest I had a nagging thought…namely, why? I mean, we’ve done a bunch of good things and I think/hope we’ve invigorated a DC vinyl scene by supporting our local mom and pop shops and participating in building the DC Record Fair into a solid quarterly event. And yes, on the way we became the Official Blog for Record Store Day in 2009, 2010, and I’m proud to say we retain the same affiliation going into 2011.
But there’s been a push/pull inherent here…having added the national audience via Record Store Day and the caliber of bands and artists who’ve guested here for three and a half years, how can we just underscore the DC area alone? Each neighborhood, in each town, in each state, in each country, has some sort of ‘vinyl district.’ Why not leverage this to support them too?
The overarching concept was going underserved, I’ve felt. There’s a construct we’re seeking to support, not just one medium (vinyl) in one town. And that has been made more apparent to me, year after year, with our Record Store Day affiliation. There’s a cultural aesthetic town by town being stoked by the brick and mortar shops supported by Record Store Day, so why not work to give them their due beyond the DC/MD/VA vicinity?
Thus, a new reason d’etre; The Vinyl District Network.
We’ve added eight additional cities for localized, scene-specific coverage just as you’ve become used to with what is now simply TVD DC.
As of this morning you can also visit TVD New York City, TVD Los Angeles, TVD New Orleans, TVD Memphis, TVD Chapel Hill, TVD Toronto, and TVD United Kingdom. On 1/17 we’ll be joined by TVD Seattle, spreading our reach into ten cities (with a few more to come as the year progresses.)
Recently a friend asked me a rather astute question while I was explaining this endeavor to him—isn’t any blog or site its own national or international destination – why break it up? The answer is simply to offer regionalized content and a presence for the record stores in their neighborhoods where a walk or a drive isn’t out of the question, allowing for the almost forgotten, but renewable notion of physical community.
Actually, and with all candor, it’s an experiment in taking the DC model and imparting it to other cities in support of each city’s scene. We, you reading this, and the city editors who actually reside in the aforementioned cities, will find out together if this works. There will be some shared postings across the network, but the bulk of the content will be city or region-specific, composed by the TVD editors who actually live and work in the cities above.
And to be honest, we’re all a bit more than optimistic.
Some thank-you’s are in order before we move on: I’m hugely indebted to my friend Aaron Powell for building this new home for TVD, nail by nail. I’m grateful for his dedication and enthusiasm, even with my many “can we move that to the left” or “how about five pixels over” emails. Thank you, Aaron.
Olivia Ung, TVD’s new DC editor has become absolutely invaluable to this endeavor with only a few weeks on the job. Lauren, Pavla, Rachel, Jay, Courtney, Theresa, Stephanie, Laurence and Stuart, our new TVD editors in each city, have all joined this experiment with enthusiasm and ideas of their own to make this very special indeed. I thank all of you as well.
And I thank you for reading this and following us to the new brick and pixel location. You’re making this possible.
Oh, and me? I’ll still be here too, blogging and posting per usual. And perhaps a bit more now that things have settled down. Sort of.
So, with that—no relaunch parties or concurrent bullshit—I return you to your regular TVD. Already in progress.
