Getting involved

Not that this sudden PR attempt to adjudge how much of our audience actually cares is in any way connected to our missing out on a nomination in Record Of The Day's industry awards' Best Blog category - three of the nominees don't exist any more! - but...

A little while ago we came up with the idea of Celebrity Muxtape, basically a bog standard 'compile us a mixtape, oh really good musician type' feature but with the additional extra that we'd then slave away and compile a proper streaming Muxtape with their suggestions on. Then after we'd published four the RIAA shut Muxtape down, and while we attempted to continue with Celebrity Playlist the truth finally caught up with us. We've kept a log of everyone we've kindly asked via email or Myspace message to compile us a playlist/Muxtape - and not huge names by any means - and the number we've had no response to is now exactly treble the number that we've actually managed to publish. One band leader promised us a list imminently and then presumably got overtaken by other things, having been constantly on tour since. One manager told us his client would jump at the chance and would pass on our request when they were back from holiday, and we never heard from either again. One really exciting possibility we still have fingers crossed for having recently been back in touch with their label (hi, Annette). The rest just never responded.

Bar the pending nature of this latter case, Celebrity Playlist is therefore dead.

But what musical guest feature to replace it with? Interviews... well, you've seen what we're like at them, and besides there's a thousand and one competing publications on that score. Our initial thought was one of those musical upbringing questionnaires (first single bought, song for a rainy day, that sort of thing), but the other site we write for is also planning a regular feature along those lines and they have better contacts and far, far more readers, so we're helping out on that instead. Attempts to resurrect Songs To Learn And Sing have all failed, as tempting as it is just to go back to that - after all, writing about one song is easier than writing about twelve. So we're throwing the floor open - any suggestions for something to pitch to artists we like from the new year onwards?