Dear Friends,

For the past two years, I’ve published NashvilleZine.com as an independent media outlet covering what I think is the best music in town. I’ve actually been publishing websites that cover local music since 1999. While it hasn’t always been fun, it has always been educational. What I’ve learned about media, readers, programming, music and the web has been more than I could have learned in school.

Unfortunately, that education had a high price. I’ve heavily invested myself financially and personally in my publications. While I was always happy to do it, I’ve recently realized that I need to spend my energy elsewhere.

So I’ve come to the somewhat sad decision that it’s time to close down NashvilleZine.

Like anyone who creates something personally important, I’d hate to compromise my original vision for the site in order to keep it running. Such compromise is what I encounter whenever I consider options for keeping the site alive. I’ve thought a great deal about ways to revitalize my interest in the site, but no matter what ideas I have, it doesn’t change the fact that my passion for the site has gone.

I’ve always been a writer. And at this point in my life, I want and I need to focus on what’s important to me: my novels. I am about to publish my second novel and I need to spend my time promoting it. Also, I’ll be writing my third novel soon and continuing my search for the ever-elusive book deal. This will leave me with very little time for other projects.

Over two years, we’ve had many fine contributors all of whom were personally involved in the music scene–whether creating music themselves or promoting it via shows they booked, labels they ran, or just their immense fandom. I want to thank them all personally for giving their time and effort freely to NashvilleZine. Without their efforts and your readership, the Zine would never have been as successful as it was.

Thank you to:
Ryan Ervin
Ben Wilkinson
Chris Spoltore
Stephanie Filippini
Andy Schenck
Jeremy Ferguson
Jessica Yung
Aaron Robinson
Rebecca McKnight
Jay Phillips
Mike Shepherd
Janet Timmons
Michael Eades
Jon Bates
Michael Davis
Sam Smith
Caldwell Dunlap
Erin Mobley

I hope you’ll support their other projects as well as my own.

Finally, thank you, readers, who’ve made this site the wonderfully active hub of information, controversy, and fun it’s been for the past two years.

If you’d like to drop me a line, please send an email to todd@todd-a.com.

Best of luck to you all.

Todd Anderson

We just noticed that our Contact Form hadn’t been working. If you’ve tried to use it to send us news or show info, our apologies. It’s working again.

Because I spent almost every day rebuilding the Zine.

Ahem, as you may have noticed, we lost the ability to post news and comments sometime Tuesday. Our host switched servers on Monday night and effed some database connection. So we’ve moved hosts. And I had to repopulate the database line by line. Twice. I’ve got to give a big public thanks to Zach Collier who helped me troubleshoot and gave me tons of great help with coding and other nerdly things.

Our downtime has, of course, left Dr. Carl Von Carligula with nothing to do online. Maybe he’s discovered Texas Hold ‘Em or porn.

Anyway, we appear to be functioning again. I’ll probably find oodles of little problems over the weekend. I shudder to think.

The new host is a little pricier than the old one. So I’m probably going to have to raise the ad prices (slightly) next week. If you’d like to help out and get a cheap-ass ad, please buy one right away. It’s only $10 / month (for the time being) and you can change your ad as much as you like to advertise your band, mySpace page or next show. It would really help me defray some of the costs I’ve incurred this week. Thank you.

And kids, let this be a lesson to you: back up your database every week.

We’ve been running a lot of “At Large” news lately because we haven’t been hearing from bands. So what’s up with your band? Got any news? Send it to us.

PS–we think it’s bullshit when bands won’t allow us to download their mp3s from MySpace. What are they? Metallica? Downloading mp3s is where it’s at. What do you think?

We are so ashamed and perplexed.

(Actually, we’re not really ashamed.)

It was nice to get a little personal recognition from the Scene last week, especially considering the hours I put into this site, but the Zine runs as well as it does thanks to our contributors who keep the listings and gossip up to date. (read more…)

We haven’t finished combing through it, but here’s some highlights from the Scene’s Best of Nashville issue. With our crabby comments appended.

(read more…)

We re-designed. Hopefully, this will make everything easier to read. We’ve broken out the shows’ details so that you can see today’s shows spotlighted separately from the news. This will give us more room to write news and features in the other column. As usual, tell us what sucks.

Also, our deep gratitude to Brian Fuzzell (reach him here) for the kickass new graphic up top and to Zach Collier for help with the coding. And thanks to Simply Steve for letting us (until he finds out) use a pic of Matt Pelham that he took.

Thanks,
the Zine.

Hmmm…

A couple of announcements.

1) You’ll notice the huge ads across the top are gone. Good riddance.

2) You’ll also notice the “Podcasts” link above is active.

3) It is officially the dog days of summer. Because we pride ourselves on having writers who are in bands, many of them are on tour and unable to contribute much and the rest of us are just lazy. So, we’re looking for some new talent to fill in this summer. If you’d like to be considered for a spot as a contributor to the Zine, here’s what to do: send an email to info at nashvillezine dot com with a sample of your writing. If you’ve got a blog, you can just send us a link to that. If not, write up a show or do a quick review of a record. Nothing over 250 words. Anything to show us you’ve at least got a 9th grade level of literacy. We’ll pick a couple of people to contribute to the Zine for the next couple of months (and maybe beyond).

Note: Preference will be given to persons in bands (so tell us if you are) and ladies (because we’ve got enough meatswingers as it is).

God help us.