Things have been kind of quiet around here after an almost two year run of doing monthly posts called Media Bites where I discussed/reviewed movies, TV, music, and other media that I consumed that month.
Media Bites wasn’t that time consuming, but I kind of lost my interest in doing it every month. But what I did love about it was curating the list of new songs I discovered that month.
That idea kind of took hold of me and I decided to turn it into the main focus of the project and the idea just kind of ran from there. I decided to set publish a playlist on Apple Music and Spotify each month. But that left out the part that I was missing in the song sections of the Media Bites posts – I was sharing the new music I was discovering and liking, but not really why I liked it. That’s when the idea of a newsletter hit me.
As the idea started churning my head I struggled to come up with a name for the project. It obviously had to be music related and the domain name had to be available. I spent a good few days just thinking about it when “downbeat” hit me. I don’t remember the other options I was playing with which in hindsight leads me to believe I made the right choice. I went with the .fm for the address because, well it sounds like a radio station.
With the name selected the next step was branding. I more or less had the look in mind, so that came together pretty quickly.
After that became the technology – namely setting up the newsletter. I went with a platform that was pretty stripped down and not feature rich which is totally unlike me.
It’s been eight months since I sent out the first newsletter and in that time I’ve switched newsletter platforms and even set up a website for the project.
I’m as excited about this project as I am working on the ninth issue as I was with the first one, if not more so.
Downbeat.fm enables me to share music that I love, write about music, create graphics, shoot photos for everything that I need, and use cool technology to do it all.
I’m quite proud of the project and having a ton of fun doing it.
You can subscribe to the newsletter at Downbeat.fm and even follow me on Apple Music or Spotify where the monthly playlists (and other playlists) are always available. I post the same playlists on both platforms, so there are no differences if you use one over the other.