A few weeks ago, I wrapped up the first year of writing my music blog, Unsung Sundays. Technically speaking, I’ve been writing it for a year and a half, but I took time away from it at a couple points last year (usually holiday seasons), and it took a couple months longer than expected for me write 52 posts. Unsung Sundays is an experimental blog for me. I listen to a lot of music while I work, and I wanted an easy way to share my new favourites with my friends. Instead of just telling people what was new whenever we chatted about it in person, a blog seemed like a faster and more frequent way to communicate. I share about five records every Sunday — some old, some new, hopefully all worth listening to. I summarized how much time I’ve spent on Unsung in another blog post, but here’s a quote:
- 52 weeks (obviously)
- 84 posts
- 223 recommended records
- 2,809 recommended songs (!!)
- 2 special playlists (1 for Stanley Cup 2013 and 1 for Kanye West songs)
- 1 guest post
- 61 followers on Tumblr
- 63 likes on Facebook
- 15 followers on Twitter
- 116 tweets
- Countless hours listening to music and creating content.
I’m not kidding about Unsung being my experimental blog. I think it’s been a learning exercise in more ways than one. It’s on Tumblr, and I’ve learned that long posts aren’t exactly the best way to communicate there. I’ve had no fewer than three major formats on Unsung:
- a long post with full-length album reviews of three to five records a week
- a short post with one full-length album review for one record every Sunday
- five short posts throughout the day on every Sunday with tiny snippets explaining why I’m recommending the album. (This is the current format.) In the future, I’m going to be changing this again because I haven’t found the sweet spot. For some people, this comes naturally, but for me, I’m still experimenting with the best way to get messages to people. The people that read Unsung really seem to love it, but there just aren’t a lot of people that do that. And while the audience count isn’t everything, it’s good encouragement to continue writing. The point is this: it’s been a year, but keep following the blog (or start following it). It’s been fun, and it’ll be interesting to see if any changes in the future cause a significant change in my readership. (And as you can see from the numbers above, I’m pretty honest about my readers.)