A Farewell of Sorts

Hey all. I wanted to get up a post to apologize for our sudden drop off the face of the live music world without announcing anything ahead of time. That was bad form. See, I’m on vacation this week for the holidays and I have recently been forced to make some tough decisions about the direction of the site and what sort of projects I’d like to focus on in the near future. But I didn’t really communicate all of this to all of you; turns out I just ignored the inevitable and decided to take off for vacation early.

Yeah, I’m pretty awesome like that.

At any rate, in case it wasn’t obvious already, I’ve made the decision recently to cease day-to-day operations here on Live Music Blog.com to free myself up for more exciting and interesting things in the very near future. We’ve had a great run together, but recent changes in my life have caused me to drift apart from running the site and enjoying the time spent online as much as I used to. At first I thought I was burnt out on live music in general, but I still go see as many concerts as before if the timing is right (it all depends on who’s in town and when…always). So I did some more soul-searching and the overwhelming feeling that I was left with was that it’s simply time for me to move on from the site and the great community of friends that I got to meet from around the site over the past couple years. The contributors that have helped out over the years have proven invaluable to me and my inspiration level, and I’m grateful to have met so many awesome people as a result of operating the blog. But the waning of interest has certainly been obvious over the past couple months and it was doing us all a great disservice to try and continue on with something that is less than passionate where it needs to be.

So what does this mean for the site and the great authors currently gracing our hallowed halls? Well I think we’re all just going to head off our separate ways in the short term, especially considering how busy all of our lives have become over the past year or so. We’re going to let the site stand for now and we’re going to just chill and take some time to figure out what’s next. I have a few ideas cooking up but I also really want to start getting back into skateboarding, so I’m trying to keep an open mind about how much time I’ll be spending on the interwebs.

I want to thank each and every visitor that stopped by to hang out, each and every commenter that tried to call us on our bullshit, and each and every person that emailed us offline to say “what’s up” or “keep up the good work” or whatever. And I want to thank Forbes.com for writing up one of the most entertaining descriptions of the site ever assembled (and still referenced even to this day):

Choosing from among the scores of genre-specific blogs is no mean feat, but Live Music Blog, edited by Justin Ward, is a cut above many. Devoted to live music, with an emphasis on jam bands, it mainly serves as a clearing house for “jamcasts” from favorites like String Cheese Incident and Government Mule, to popular summer jam festivals like Bonnaroo. (These downloads are virtually unavailable outside this blog and a handful of fan sites.) Search from a drop down menu of some thirty bands for group-specific news and music, Austin City Limits also among the list. Archives go back to July 2004 and are searchable by month, band or headline. The blog, updated almost daily, generates a good deal of commotion dispensing, then analyzing the scuttlebutt in the live music scene. A recent headline screamed that Cream might play at Madison Square Garden in the fall, though that remains unconfirmed. Another speculates that Phish, the now-disbanded king of all jam bands, would release a box set of the “epic 1998 Island tour.” Needless to say, the site caters to serious live music lovers.

BEST: The rumor mill. While there is no telling what is true or not, these fun posts generate a lot of excitement and discussion.

WORST: Like the parking lot of a Dead concert, the site is disorganized and difficult to navigate

I still consider the site’s comparison to a Dead lot as one of our proudest accomplishments. Thanks for all the good times and please keep in touch.

Very sincerely,

Justin Ward
Editor/Founder
vibes@livemusicblog.com

Tagged as: farewell