In tandem with the BBC Sound Of 2012 poll, a collection of music bloggers decided to get together to try and design our own list of exciting artists that we thought could break through over the next twelve months. The initial results of fifteen artists were published in a long list back at the start of December. Today we return to the results to produce the final five winners from that list, again in line with the BBC, as today they produce their own finalists.
You can now see our successful top five candidates below. Whether they will take 2012 by the horns or not can only be understood over time, but we hope that you will agree it’s a list of quality, promising acts. The enormous attention paid to the BBC poll means the survey is often accused of being something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and although the collective readership of all of our blogs and our poll’s coverage can be measured in the many thousands, it’s unlikely that our results will secure the same assured fame for our artists.
This should in theory mean that our collective punts are more of a gamble, simply serving up artists we truly believe in, rather than those with the largest recording contracts, but seeing as The Recommender also votes in the BBC poll, with absolute, genuine integrity, we should perhaps dispute this. It’s a theory for others to debate in fairness. Either way, both polls have been a bit of fun and all these new year shenanigans should help shine a little light on a fantastic selection of artists. What do you think? How do the polls compare? Who would you have voted for?
As you can see from our 2010 review, (found here), we love an end of year wrap up, so we can reflect on what The Recommender’s achieved over the last twelve months, hopefully giving you a little insight to what a year in a music blogger’s life can be like. Each year throws up new opportunities for this blog, as it continues to establish itself in the world of music and this year was not short of new highlights. It’s a labour of love producing this site’s content, but you should also know that the rewards, both emotional and practical, are enjoyably plentiful.
We have been fortunate enough for the blog’s reputation and credibility to continue growing year on year. This in turn allows us to further penetrate the corners of the music industry, giving us closer access to artists and building relationships with many other music bloggers. New avenues continue to open up for us, mostly entirely unexpected, as any benefits, opportunities or relationships are always a bi-product of what we’re really here to focus on – to regularly provide a spotlight on excellent emerging music. If our reputation as a commentator on new music increases then that allows our spotlight to have more and more impact, which in turn is a benefit to everyone.
Perhaps the most enjoyable of all 2011′s opportunities has been on the radio. From the start of the year we’ve repeatedly been invited onto the Tony Marks New Music Show on Juice Radio – the largest station in our home city of Brighton. Each month we pop into the studio to natter about new music and deliver a couple of tunes that we’re excited about. You can hear all twelve shows here on our Soundcloud.
Elsewhere on the radio waves we had the privilege of an invite into the BBC6 Music station in London. We recorded a couple of appearances for Tom Robinson’s Friday show, handing over several tunes that we thought were highlights from our blog’s coverage. That ended up with us then being asked to do a half hour takeover of the show, via the medium of Twitter, where we discussed a number of our selected songs live on the social network as they played out on the show. Somehow having to cope with live reactions from listeners via Twitter made us slightly more nervous, as we defended our choices to a barrage of tweets, but there’s no denying it was another awesome experience.
We can also add The Mud Hut Digital Podcast to those that asked to interview us this year. That show has been uploaded here if you want to hear which tracks we delivered to this excellent bunch of ‘Casters. The year was closed off with Hype Machine’s Dev Sherlock getting in touch with us for an appearance on Hype Machine‘s online radio station, but that doesn’t go out until the 9th of January, so that interview should actually appear as part of our 2012 roundup in twelve months time. It certainly sets us up for more radio coverage for next year though, which can only be a good thing.
Away from the radio our most popular post of 2011 on this blog was with our Best Music Blog of 2011 awards. This peers-only voted poll attracted more votes and more nominations than ever before, with over 180 music bloggers casting their votes for 187 different sites. As before, it became a socially-networked talking point on sites such as Twitter, marking it out as one of our most-discussed posts of the year, even being called “The Grammy’s for music blogs” by this year’s runner up, Pigeons & Planes. It was another brilliant experience which allowed us to interact with our beloved network once again, as music bloggers from Japan, to the US, to Europe, to Australia, all got their votes in. Find the results and a comment from the winner right here. We will definitely do it all over again next November.
On the subject of votes, we were once again asked to get involved in the BBC Sound Of 2012 poll, alongside a selection of other commentators of music, from both the traditional and online music media. This was quickly followed up by an invite to vote in the music blogger’s equivalent Sound Of 2012 poll, which ran in tandem with the BBC’s, along with 33 other prominent bloggers. The five finalists of both polls should be published tomorrow online.
Obviously a year in the life of a music blogger involves going to a billion live shows, too many to mention on here, but suffice to say there were many special highlights, a lot of which we provided monthly gig previews for inside the excellent Brighton Source Magazine publication. We also work in one of Brighton’s prominent venues, which means helping to manage live shows from some ace artists. The peak of which allowed us to fuck about backstage with none other than Alexis from Sleigh Bells, which, for anyone that knows Mike personally, is something that hardly helped to calm his enormous crush on her.
As in previous years, The Great Escape was another networking paradise on our doorstep, as what seems like the entire music industry arrives in Brighton to celebrate and hopefully sign up some of the world’s best emerging artists. Alongside dozens and dozens of shows over four days, we managed to squeeze in our own after party as The Recommender vs Drowned In Sound served up Alpines, Hey Sholay, Real Fur and Beat Connection. Over that weekend we also organised a music bloggers meet up at our local pub, which allowed us to press the palms of lots of friendly bloggers, as we enjoyed a few free drinks in between the bands. The next Great Escape should see us hosting The Recommender vs My Bands Better Than Your Band, but details of that will be summarised in our 2012 roundup at the end of the year.
The tunes we’ve discovered this year were as excellent as they were bountiful; a selection of which you can now hear during one of The Recommender’s many DJ sets, which pop up in any one of the six Brighton venues that now book us each month. As 2011 closed we embarked on our usual end of year roundups, with Austra‘s Feel It Break album hitting number one on our Best Albums Of 2011, as well as their tune, Lose It, topping our Best Tracks Of 2011 list. Singer, Katie Stelmanis, got in touch with us to hand us a quote for the article and to thank us for both accolades. It was well deserved in a strong year of emerging music. Suffice to say we will be listening to their music long into 2012 and beyond.
As you can probably tell we adore interacting with the online music community and our beloved network continued to expand all year. We’ve added another 2500 Twitter followers to the ranks this year, now reaching the 4500 mark, (add us here if you haven’t already), as well as now counting our Facebook followers in the thousands, allowing to reach ever greater numbers of music lovers all year long. And it’s those people we want to finish by thanking. To all the readers that visit our blog in their thousands each week, to all the industry folk who send us lots of freebies and who speak with us on a daily basis, not forgetting the artists that we continue to interact with, meet with, watch live, and who’s music we adore spending our lives listening to each year. That’s why we do this Recommender thingy. It’s a joy and a pleasure and above all we hope that comes through in our coverage. Here’s hoping we all get lots from 2012, as we set about another year of discovery. Thanks to you all. (MB)
