October Update, or Something Like That

3 weeks.

Justcastlive has been down for 3 weeks as of tomorrow. As of right now as I type this they don't have an ETA as to when the site is going to be back up. They have a new coder working on it however and have promised that when they come back online justcastlive will work even better than ever before.

I haven't really decided what I'm doing with the show long term. Last weeks' show, as well as the upcoming broadcast for this week, will be broadcast on our awdio.com page.

Now let's talk about the future of Indie Spotlight....

Those who read my last blog post will know that I have been undecided about the future of the broadcast. To be honest about it, I'm still not 100% sure about the direction in which I would like to go as far as the live show. Justcastlive crashing so abruptly has kinda backed me into a corner, Indie Spotlight is not just an internet show broadcast on justcastlive, it's a brand that I've spent the last 6 and a half years building. Even after all this time I'm still passionate about sharing music that quite frankly might not be heard if I didn't play it. I really thought that we had finally found a home, our viewership was increasing every week, and it really looked like that this show was finally starting to come back to the number of loyal viewership that we had in our glory days on blogtv.

As much as I hate to say it, but our hosting site being offline for an extended period of time could easily have changed that.

I really have to level with you folks, last week I really enjoyed just doing the broadcast on awdio without having to follow a chatroom, surprises on the guest cams, making sure that I was picking the right camera angle, deciding on whether or not to play a video, and getting a feel for the live crowd listening to the show. To be honest about it, while I enjoy the interaction in a live chat, especially when I get questions about the musicians being played and dropping links to their music I felt that the show did just fine without it.

These are my thoughts going forward, and as I said before I'm not going to drop another "change your bookmarks and follow us here" post. As I mentioned in my previous post, while what we are doing, which is play music that might otherwise die because people don't have other avenues to find great music outside of shows like Indie Spotlight, is to me, very important, it's not so important to other people to scour the internet and seek me out. Viewer/listener statistics don't lie, while we were starting to get close on justcastlive we still don't have near the stats that we put up on blogtv, or even dare I say on blogtalkradio. When you go bouncing around the internet, no matter how much people enjoy your show, the interaction in the chatroom, and the experience of your broadcast in general they won't keep following you from place to place no matter how epic you might be.

Please keep in mind, this is not my final decision as far as the live broadcast, this is just where I think we might be right now.

There is another site that I can start doing the show in the similar format that we had on justcastlive right now, in fact I've already started building a profile on there, It's a smaller site than justcastlive as far as viewership but as this point what would it matter since I suspect with this extended downtime justcastlive will also have diminished viewership. I'm not naming it yet since I'm really unsure what I want to do. I promised you guys and gals that when we went all in with justcastlive that it was it, the last time I was going to ask you folks to reset your bookmarks and find us at this new latest and greatest site and I really meant it.

What I'm thinking (again, not set in stone especially since the last time I used awdio they had reliability issues as well) is to continue to do the show on awdio, and depending on when justcastlive comes back online, resume the show on there while simulcasting to awdio for people who either just want to listen to the show without being involved in a chat, or miss the live show and would like to listen to it at a later date.

This way, I'm keeping my promise to you guys, that you can check out the live show if you would like, at the same time offering an archived show for the folks that don't have time, or are even in the wrong time zone for the live broadcast.

In the meantime, check out the show on awdio.com, and if you miss the live broadcast, well unless I really screw it up, listen to the archive.

As always, thank you all for your continued support. I have no idea how I earned it, until I realize that you folks understand that it's not about me, it's about the musicians.

On their behalf as well as mine, thank you.