Best Music Blog: Hidden Track
Every week, we will be profiling the best music blogs on the Internet. But instead of writing a simple blog review, we've decided to give the blog creators the opportunity to tell you a little about themselves...
Hidden Track is an independent blog affiliated with the good people at Glide Magazine. Narrowing the scope of what this rag covers would be criminal, but the great vision involves covering anything having to do with music, ever. We concentrate on the 'live,' but this site ain't no one-trick pony, and everything made in a studio need not fret about exclusion. We started with an audience of about 50 loyal readers and have since grown the site to reach an average of around 45,000 visitors a month. Not bad for a couple of dudes with 9-5 jobs.
The Background: In September '06 the owners of Glide Magazine decided to start a new blog to offer readers news and opinions about music on a daily basis. Some Dude, our current Managing Editor, was asked to write the blog, but he couldn't devote the time needed. He suggested Ace Cowboy of Slack LaLane to the Glide guys and Ace took the gig. Ace enjoyed reading message board posts from Scott Bernstein, and asked him to help start this new venture. On October 25, 2006 Ace published the first post on Hidden Track, and nearly two years later we just posted our 2,000th piece. Earlier this year Ace quit and Scott stepped up to take the reigns assisted by the previously-mentioned Some Dude.
What We Cover: From that very first day we never wanted to pigeonhole ourselves into covering a specific genre of music, as our tastes are all over the place. Within a week you can find posts about the Specials, RAQ, Willie Nelson and Dr. Dog on Hidden Track. If we dig the band, we'll post about them. That being said, we all grew up seeing Phish shows, so we tend to post news, interviews, remembrances and opinions about that band more than others.
How We're Unique: Scott and Some Dude write the majority of the posts and manage a staff of twenty contributors. All of our writers have different likes and dislikes when it comes to music, and we're not afraid to speak our minds. We have over 10 weekly columns and about 20 different columns that run either bimonthly or monthly. Some of our most popular columns include Cover Wars (which lets our readers decide who does the best cover of a particular song or artist), the B List (HT's version of the music list) and Blips (where we look at emerging artists who may not be on our readers' radars).
The Three Coolest Moments in HT history according to Scott:
1. Legendary rocker Alice Cooper gives Hidden Track a shout out on his nationally syndicated radio show.
2. Getting to interview Phish keyboardist Page McConnell on three separate occasions.
3. When one of my favorite writers of all-time, Randy Ray, asked if he could contribute a biweekly column.
The Future: We've been working on a redesign of the site for the past four months. We hope to go live with Hidden Track 2.0 by Labor Day. Our longterm goals include adding contributors from Chicago, LA, Seattle and other cities where we don't have any staff members, continuing to build our traffic and to eventually start covering more happenings outside of the music world.
Make sure to check out Hidden Track at http://www.glidemagazine.com/hiddentrack/
Big ups to Scotty who makes our great machine run so effortlessly every day.
Posted by: Some Dude | July 29, 2008 at 08:17 AM
Big ups to all you guys - I live for the shows you dig up in Grousing the Aisles, and without HT I would never know when to malnourish my dogs (hopefully that happens very soon).
Posted by: Matt | July 29, 2008 at 11:07 AM
congrats.
Hopefully we will all be malnourishing dogs very soon.
Posted by: Partyin' Peeps | July 29, 2008 at 12:30 PM
Nice props Scotty! Hidden Track continues to tear it up!
Posted by: wardy | July 29, 2008 at 03:03 PM
Fantastic!
Posted by: Jennifer Kirk | July 29, 2008 at 07:15 PM
Congrats on the mention. I was never much of a fan of music until I started reading Hidden Track.
Posted by: Rebecca | July 29, 2008 at 09:38 PM
Excellent choice. HT is always an informative read and the guys are extremely knowledgeable.
Posted by: nyctaper | July 30, 2008 at 02:13 PM
as only a true phan can say....
WORST BLOG EVER
;D
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Barbara
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