100th Post!!! Time for the FAQs about WUASTM!
We're celebrating our 100th post and thought it was about time for some housekeeping. We get a lot of questions about our music focus, features, and reviews and instead of answering the same questions over and over, we decided to post this FAQ as a general reference for readers, promoters and anyone else who happened to land here. ALWAYS feel free to leave us comments and suggestions either by e-mail or in a blog comment. We'll get back to you as soon as we possibly can. In the meantime, here are some common questions we get. We may update this from time to time and we'll keep it handy on the About WUASTM sidebar section for newbies. Thanks to everyone for sending your kind comments our way. It helps to know you appreciate our efforts.
Q. What "new music" does your blog post?
A. We focus on new releases from up-and-coming musicians or independent musicians, which are artists on an independent label or self-release their music. We do follow some successful non-mainstream musicians who merit attention. Our goal is to provide music and information about those artists in order to help promote them.
Q. Do you have a particular music genre you favor?
A. We really don't like to label music so we don't have certain genres or styles we prefer. We do realize there's times when it's necessary to reference genres in order to describe the music. But we appreciate music of all type whether you call it jazz, blues, country, folk, rock, hip hop, rap, or world music.
Q. How do you choose which artists to feature?
A. We try to support artists and music we are currently listening to and have a new release. We don't post on everything we hear nor just what promoters are sending us. We definitely discriminate in featuring music that we think is good enough to feature and hopefully will appeal to our readers.
Q. Do you keep up with other blogs?
A. No, we don't try to follow the latest trends like some bloggers do. We've seen many blogs re-post somebody else's ideas as an attempt to drive traffic their way. We don't copy anyone and don't jump on the band wagon of the latest thing.
Q. Do you have regular features?
A. Yes. Our regular features for 2010 will be called Brewing (upcoming releases), Percolating (up and coming artists), Video Cafe (new music videos), Concert Grounds (concert news), Mailbag (music submissions), Quick Brew Reviews (new release reviews), and The Weekly Top Twenty Tracks. Also, at year end we'll recap the top songs and the best albums we've reviewed.
Q. How do you rate your album reviews?A. Can we say we "play it by ear"? Bad puns aside, we try to quantify it into a rating by looking at both individual song strength and overall consistency. We're old school and still feel an album is more of a complete snapshot of the artist's current work, even in this digital age of single servings. Obviously, an album with many strong songs merits additional rating points. However, if the album is uneven and/or contains poor quality, rating points will be deducted. This is especially true when there is excess "filler material" (i.e. songs just to pad the album length). We try to be as honest as we can to form an unbiased opinion, since we aren't ad driven or have a target audiences (except for people who like good music!). We're not Pitchfork, who lives by young audience appeal, or Rolling Stone, who panders to an older crowd (no offense to them, still the best music pubs in the business, even if we don't agree with their reviews sometimes).
Q. When do you recommend an album?
A. When it gets a minimum of 7.5 on a 10 scale. This means the album is quality work to our ears, ie. consistently very good and/or outstanding songs compensate for any mediocre moments. You'll see this score in green, as in GO get it. These are ones we feature in our Amazon Store and recap on the year end best album list. Any score from 4 to 7 will appear in yellow for CAUTION meaning it's decent, perhaps even acceptable for some, but there's not enough outstanding work in our opinion to recommend it to our readers. We take our recommendations pretty seriously when judging them (those close to the making the grade, ie 7, we spent extra time listening to make sure it doesn't deserve a higher mark). A score below 4 will be in red for STOP, don't buy it, it's just not good, period.
Q. How do you choose which albums to review?
A. There are 100's of new releases each month. We automatically disregard all the commercial releases, live recordings, re-issues, "greatest hits" compilations, and most EP's. Again, we're old school and we want a new full length work to review. Next, we look for new releases fitting our criteria (see the first question above). Finally, we listen to a stack of new releases and focus on the best of those because we don't have time to write more than a few reviews a week..
Q. So, why does most your reviews seem to be on the high end of the scale?
A. Since we choose only the very best new music to review most of them will merit higher ratings. Once we weed out the mediocre ones, most reviews we write will be for above average work (5.5 or more). The only two exceptions to this rule have been: 1) a high profile release we think readers expect an opinion from us or 2) a past featured artist we are following up on. An example of exception 1 was U2's "No Line on the Horizon", which was a huge record we just couldn't overlook, we rated it a 3 here. An example of exception 2 was Ben Kweller's "Changing Horses" and while we liked Ben's past work, we only gave it a 4.5 here..
Q. Do you have any commercial interests in the artists or music?
A. No, we promote all good new music regardless of race, color, or press endorsements. We do link to Amazon and other outlets where the featured music can be purchased in order to help support the artists. Also, we have set up an Amazon store to list our best rated albums in one place for reader convenience.
Q. Do you make any money?
A. We wish -- brother, can you spare a dime? Seriously, anything we collect on the links would go to help pay the blog costs. Most blogs don't make any money and even if it would happen, it isn't going to change our opinion of what's good music.
Thanks and Enjoy, GB
Posted by Wake Up and Smell The Music at 4/24/2009 10:19 AM 
Categories: Ben Kweller,U2
Tags: WUASTM FAQs
Categories: Ben Kweller,U2
Tags: WUASTM FAQs
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