This is a farewell letter. I am closing the mixblog down. It’ll be up for one or two more months while I archive it but it’s happening. I decided at the end of 2014 that I no longer had the love nor desire to post mixes up. It was a passion project without the passion.
Part of the passion had fizzled out because I have new interests and new avenues to explore. One of those is developing a podcast. I am now currently putting the little bit of free time I used to put mixes together to publish original content. I had grown to absolutely love podcasts in 2012. Two years later and a fire was burning inside of me to develop my own. I’ll be releasing that in the next few months. I am not sure my audience here will carry over, but who knows.
The thing I’ve learned about the internet is that if you give things away people will flock. I had been giving away not only free music but my own creative services for well on 5 years. The mixes take a lot more out of me than you’d think. As I got more and more into doing it I was crafting more focused concepts behind them and taking more and more time with the cover art. Each mix would average about 10 to 15 hours to put together. That includes finding the right tracks with the right tone, tracking down as many free mp3s I could via all kinds of sites, designing the cover art, writing up the post, creating the post, preparing the files in iTunes with the right information and then merging the tracks into one track for the on the site preview, then uploading to the ftp on my server, then another hour or so sharing it around the world wide web. When I sat down and calculated this time I was putting in I was surprised how many hours I put into this thing. Five years and well over 200 mixes later… well you can do the math. That’s a ton of time.
Another contributing factor is the literal cost I pocket to run the site. My hosting runs about $16 a month, multiply that by 12 months in a year, times 5 years and that is close to $1000. Then I calculated the tracks. Many of the tracks I find for free from—well wherever. But out of the 20 to 30 tracks in a mix, around 10 of those I have to purchase. So if I estimated 10 songs purchased for the 200 mixes, that’s another $2000. Then there is the Cargo service I use for building and maintaining my site. They give me a good deal, considering I was one of their beta users, which comes out to about $85 a year. Multiply that by 5 and we are at $420 for the site maintenance. Adding all of that up and it comes out to $3420 or $684 a year. Wow, that’s a lot of scratch. Here is the kicker, my server is close to maxing out on space. I would have to pay more a month to keep the archives up of all the old mixes up.
I thought about the idea of putting up a kickstarter to drum up $6,000 for the last five years and the upcoming five. I don’t think I have the fan base to do that. I would probably, or I should say realistically, to drum up about $500, maybe a $1000. Maybe. But the thing is, this is not MY content. I did not record this music. I am simply curating and sharing. To make money, even if it is just to cover my costs and not make a profit, I would have to essentially charge for it. This would be a “subscriber supported” model which some radio stations, such as KCRW, do to fund the cause. I also thought about putting a tip bucket on the page that would open up the option of listeners / visitors to hook me up with some scratch for my troubles. The issue of that is, I’d still have to keep this thing up and running while hoping enough tips would come in to support me.
So, unless I get a flood of emails and tweets that say they’ll donate enough to keep the site running I am going to shut it down. Consider this last month from the day of this posting the deadline. If I do get enough I will then consider a Kickstarter. I honestly don’t think there will be enough ready to support the cause. This takes me to the big problem I am having keeping this thing alive. It’s the fact that, minus a few kind emails or tweets every week that my followers share, I don’t get much more out of the site. The passion is gone and the audience seems to be either bored or nonexistent.
Ok, I’m wrapping this up. It’s been a fun ride. I am proud of my dedication over the years and thanks to everyone who has supported it for the last 5 years but alas all good things must come to an end.
You can follow me on Rdio here or Soundcloud here. I create mixes on Rdio and plan to on Soundcloud but that will be it for now. Also, follow me on Twitter for the upcoming podcast news. Thanks again everyone!
Brian
