One-Year Anniversary Post and a New Project
That was fast…
Well, I’m not going to be too self-congratulatory at this point since it’s hard for me to quantify just how much of an impact Anime Instrumentality has had in affecting the dialogue on the ‘sphere with regard to anime music. Maybe lelangir would have created his anime music transcription blog even if this site didn’t exist and maybe not. Maybe The Nihon Review’s soundtrack section would have been scrapped by now and maybe not. Again, it’s hard to tell, but regardless of what obstacles lie ahead, I will say that I’ve had fun writing on here and I’ll continue to do so in the hope that my thoughts on anime music will proliferate and that people talking about anime soundtracks (especially the BGM aspects) will be more the norm than the exception. Only time will tell, but I remain optimistic about all this and that this site might be able to reach out to anime fans in the same way that the Hashihime blog has managed to do so in the VA arena.
As the post title hints, I’ve decided to try my hand at doing a new project, namely, running an anime music song of the week event and the details will be right after the jump.
Anime Song of the Week:
If there’s anything that Saimoe and its various spinoffs and incarnations have been able to demonstrate, there’s nothing more enjoyable than being able to create silly internet polls and get people to participate in them to spark some fanboying and/or serious dialogue. Naturally, I’m going to see if that can be applied to anime music, except make the polling a weekly event and allow people to nominate anime music. It’s been done through with other media (like the VGM version) and if it can even be half as successful as that, I think we’ll have something pretty viable on our hands that we can work with.
So the platform that I’m planning to use is on MyAnimeList: the Anime Music Piece of the Week Club. I’ve sort of laid the groundwork on how things will work and it shouldn’t be too hard to participate since most of you guys have MAL accounts anyways so you won’t need to sign up for a forum account or anything extraneous. At this point, what I’m looking for here is for you readers to refine my ideas and provide me with some input as far as procedures go to get things rolling along. And of course, participating would also be doubleplusgood. Though I am expecting that things will start off small, I do hope that this will grow to at least 20+ regulars. It’ll be fun to have some actual discourse flying back and forth as people discuss or even fanboy over various anime pieces. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, so if people think this great, then let’s go and see where it takes us. If you think it is a terrible idea, be sure to voice that as well as well as a suggestion on how to improve things.
With that in mind, please mosey on over to the Anime Music Piece of the Week Club and drop your two cents (or your track) so that we can get things started. Naturally, get anyone else who’s interested in this to join in and hopefully through our efforts, we can make this work while having a good time and getting others exposed to anime music that they might not otherwise have heard.
Concluding Remarks:
So despite the fact that time is becoming more and more scarce, I’m still hoping this thing takes off. As for the rest of the blog content, I’m looking forwards to the next 365 days worth of discussions and reviews until the next anniversary post!
Congrats on a year. Actually Seiyuu3 is probably more of an impact than Hashihime on the VA arena, though all three of them (including j1m0ne) have their own various kinds of impact. You cannot say that any one blog has done as much for any one aspect, aside from RandomC anyway.
Wait you already started it? I would highly suggest not using MAL clubs as a serious platform for anything new, just because MAL sucks the big one now and excludes those that don’t give a crap about getting a MAL. Keep it on your blog. Otherwise, unless you do cross-posting, which is probably the best idea now, you’ll just be losing potential traffic in the anime music BLOGsphere.
And wow, your blog birthday is the 28th? Mine’s the 29th! GUZEN DA.
Rethinking a few things in light of lelangir’s post. Should I just run everything on this blog, or would it work better on MAL? (yeah, I know that Panther’s already signed up, but I could use your comments and feedback as well seeing that I might have been a wee bit hasty)
@Panther: (I still can’t get over the fact that houkoholic killed Ueda Kana.)
@zzeroparticle: Congrats on one year. And good luck with the Music Piece of the Week competition. I’m not sure whether MAL or this site would be the better host, and I guess one could make arguments for either. As lelangir says, you’d be missing out on traffic, but perhaps the advantage of MAL is that you might be able to use word of mouth a little more effectively. The thing that makes me nervous is that you’re encouraging people to share music using Rapidshare and similar, which enters a rather gray area, ethically and legally. I think you should require users to find their own music, because then you, as an organizer, can wipe your hands a bit easier of what other people do. That, or you could just get people to share YouTube links. I mean, it’s still not completely legal, but YouTube is considered a little more whitehat than filesharing sites like Rapidshare.
The forum probably works better for something like this, but you should wait a week (or two…) to accumulate participants first.
@Sorrow-kun
Will definitely bring that up as part of things to consider. The only saving grace here is that we’re not sharing whole albums, which is something I’d find to be much more problematic. (Might also be time to take advantage of services like mp3tube, though I cringe at forcing people to sign up since that’s a barrier).
@lelangir (and pretty much everyone else)
Yup, plan isn’t supposed to start immediately. I’ll send a message out or something once we’ve reached a critical mass.
One year already? Time sure flies! Congratulations!
Congratulations! Though a bit belated. ^^ *throws roses*
@Shin
Yeah, time really has flown. I don’t think I really started getting on people’s radars until August though, but progress has been decent.
@Chika-chin
Thanks for the well wishing~
Hm sounds interesting. I’ll participate although I am not sure if I have time to check the stuff every week >< Will try.