Notes on the New Website

We shut the old site down yesterday. It was the right thing to do.

Until the past two years, VTHH was ... intermittent, at best. Rotating authors and long periods of silence defined the early days. The chart above could be read as proof that lots of content brings lots of traffic, but I don't agree. There has been lots of content lately because there has been lots to cover lately. 

The real reason for that chart is this: we've got multiple scenes going in Vermont right now, each of them powered by a core of artists who are serious about making this into a career. 2018 will be, as the kids say, a wave. Before 2017, VTHH was basically a bulletin board for local artists.

The biggest thing I saw change in 2017 was the fact I started talking to fans -- actual local fans! -- and I don't mean fans of this website, I mean fans of the artists we cover here. They want news about shows and albums. They buy tickets and they buy merch. This is all very, very good. 

Back when "The Internet" still actually existed, artists and labels used to have to worry about Search Engine Optimization: the art and science of showing up at the top of Google results. Yeah, those were the days. Zuckerborg is "The Internet" now, and the fact is, most of our traffic in the past year was driven by Facebook fans of Jarv, Lynguistic Civilians, S.I.N.siZZle, Jibba "The Gent," and Colby Stiltz. 

Yet that list only scratches the surface of what the 802 has bubbling these days. It is significant that two of those artists are not from Burlington. Even as the BTV scene is undergoing a Cambrian Explosion, crews outside of the Queen City are poised to make big noise this year: Bar None The Best and Street Religion, especially.

And beneath that? A metric shit-ton of new talent, plus old heads coming back with a vengeance. We're also in a world where any random single can make any random kid famous in 48 hours. This will be a wild, fast, unpredictable year. As ever, the coverage here will be imperfect and incomplete. 

So no matter what you're working on, keep pushing. Hone your sound, find your fans, invest real time and money. Karma may be a hippie myth, but there is a lot of room for growth right now and your hard work will pay off.