Create Digital Music is the creation of Peter Kirn, a composer/musician, media artist, educator, and technology journalist. It started off in 2005 as a relatively unknown blog with the aim of covering the development of the latest products, technologies, and trends that surround how music is produced, performed, and shared. Since then it has grown into a fully staffed online magazine and community, with contributors ranging from to leading edge software developers to world renown sound designers and artists. They share how to make the most of digital music technology on computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux), game platforms, mobile devices, electronic hardware, and DIY and handmade inventions, and examine the work of the artists and inventors who explore digital media.
After following this blog and reading every post for around six months now I can confirm that they have certainly stuck to their target audience which I feel I fall into strongly. It is only very rarely that I personally find an article uninteresting or irrelevant; the posts most often consist of an efficient in-depth insight into the topic.
Aesthetically the page has a clear colour scheme and is structured well, with search bar and popular tags at the top, and a large picture link back to the main home page no matter where you navigate to within the site. The post stream is clearly positioned in the centre of the page, with each article clearly displaying the date and title, tags associated with the post, and a short summary of the content normally positioned under a large picture relevant to the topic. The post feed also displays the number of comments made on each article to help the reader gauge how much attention the article is getting. This link is positioned right under the a clearly labeled “read more…” link that leads the reader to the full article. The right side of the page contains a large list of external links all still relevant to the music geek target audience, as well as quick links with several options of RSS subscription including the main post feed, a comments feed and a feed from the community forums. There are normally advertisements listed on the upper right of the page and every now and then between posts. Normally this amount of advertisement can become annoying to navigate around on blogs, though in this case all advertised products and services are relevant and often interesting to the target audience (i.e. SAE institute for sound technology, advertisement for NI’s graphically based music programming software Reaktor).
The individual posts most often contain a good balance of visual, audio and informative text content (Gold Panda article example). In this article with electronic artist Gold Panda, the page begins with a picture of the artist, followed by a short summary of the article content. A particularly well implemented idea for CDM is the way they usually embed a player of the artist’s music that they’re interviewing towards the beginning of the post. This allows the reader to listen to the artist’s latest releases while hearing them discuss the production process in detail to gain a clear idea of the artist’s perception. Articles often end with live videos where the discussed album/software/technology can be seen in action along with links directly leading to where the work can be obtained.
As the blog targets quite a specific target audience, the discourse used by Peter is consistent and although it may often be confusing to the average reader, it is always relevant to this target audience. The blog also doesn’t mind displaying a comic side, often containing long running jokes throughout the posts or on the occasion, a particularly nerdy joke article (binary code joke article).
Peter’s writing often contains personal content for his readers to directly relate to, such as experiences at a festival, how he felt meeting particular artists or personal opinions on particular events or happenings, though always relevant to his posts’ content. He also actively replies to comments, often ending up having entire discussions with his readers in the comment section whether he’s arguing a point, clarifying his perception or simply getting absorbed in the topic.
Since I began following the site, it has been updated consistently; most often a post or two every two days, the longest period of time being about a week when he was on holiday (through which he still couldn’t resist posting his latest musical finds and encounters).
Create Digital Music is actually the only blog that I have come across and have continued to return to regularly since finding it. The author develops a strong relationship with his readers, is extremely reliable in offering the most leading edge news in music tech with an easy to navigate, clear cut site. For these reasons I recommend it to anyone interested in whats going on at the forefront of the music tech scene.
There were some great blogs recommended by some friends in class! You can find at least three decent ones by checking out their blogs (links on the left to their groovalicious pages)
Cheers for the read
