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Focus Shift

Focus Shift

I don’t listen to as much music as I used to. There was a time where I was pumping out 12 CD reviews a month for three separate publications, for an average of one CD review every two and half days or so. These days I do a lot more on the back end of music – making connections, managing staff, mediating conflicts, solving problems. Y’know, editor-in-chief stuff. That job has only become more real to me as we switch our focus.

Up until recently, the only way that Independent Clauses was able to help bands was through reviewing stuff or writing a story on them. The staff here at IC, displeased with this, went to work. We wanted to figure out how we could best help bands, and we’ve come up with a solution.

Instead of being a magazine primarily about helping bands get discovered by listeners, labels and radio, we’re going to be a magazine focused on distributing info that bands need. We’re going to run articles about how to be a band – how to book shows, how to manage catastrophes on the road, new ways to release music, new ways to make money as a band, new ways to be a band in general. We want to be the magazine that you need to read to be on the cutting edge of the post-record label music industry.

We’re shifting our coverage that way this month, with articles on Swimfaster Godwhispers’ new way to distribute music and Matt Jim’s world-class booking service. But we’re not doing it all at once – we’re also featuring a great article on Marc with a C that has almost nothing to do with being a band in a post-record label age. But it’s a heck of a lot of fun to read.

We’re still going to be doing CD reviews, as this is a valuable service we provide for bands. We’re still going to be doing concert reviews, concert photography and all that jazz. We’re not forsaking our bread and butter – we’re just going on a low-carb diet, so to speak. We’ll be putting a lot of the review-type content online, while putting a lot of the articles in the physical editions, which we’ll be printing quarterly. Our first quarterly edition is planned for release in mid-January.

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to shoot me an e-mail at Stephen@independentclauses.com . I check my e-mail a lot as editor-in-chief, so I probably will respond pretty quickly. After all, I may not listen to as much music as I used to, but I love music and musicians more than ever.

Stephen Carradini

Stephen@independentclauses.com