2015 has been a busy year for Essentially Pop. We’ve reviewed, interviewed, met and spoken to a lot of artists, from a lot of countries and genres. We’ve listened to a lot of music and we’ve been to a lot of shows, we’ve taken a lot of photos, we’ve written a lot of words. We’ve gone from four writers to having 20 on our books, with a core group of about 10 who write on a regular basis.
In 2016 we hope to introduce some new features while continuing with the popular ones from 2015. Our “Essential Weekly Playlist”, which we started in September this year remains a firm favourite, and we shall definitely continue that into 2016, with our lists for January already organised.
Added to the mix will be weekly reviews of Tradiio artists as well as monthly reviews of Flying Vinyl‘s releases; we shall also be bringing more unsigned and independent artists to the notice of our readers: reviews, interviews, and special features.
We will continue to update readers on those artists we’ve featured during 2014 and 2015, and add even more to the Essentially Pop family.
In 2016 we’d like to add movie and book reviews as well, particularly those which have been independently produced and/or have a musical theme.
Our website will have a new format, with articles being easier to read and having more photos. We hope too to issue our magazine once again, on a more regular basis.
In 2015 we saw our artist roster go from being mostly England based to include artists in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, The USA, Canada, France, and Australia. Our current writers also come from a wide area, including the USA, Scotland, and England. We’d love to have some Irish writers, as we have regular guest list invitations to see live music in Dublin in particular. This does not of course preclude writers from other countries!
Since moving over to our WordPress.org site at the beginning of 2015, we’ve seen our readership increase dramatically, with the number of visitors this year swell from 6031 in total for 2014, to 38,505 – with still just over 3 hours of 2015 left. In terms of views, that’s a total of 10,136 for 2014 – and a whopping 64,697 this year. Not bad going for a site that focuses on independent and unsigned artists! We’d like to thank every single one of you for visiting our site, and we hope that we’ve entertained and informed you, and that you will be back in 2016 and bring many many more people with you.
We introduced a second Twitter account in 2015, and in total we have in the region of 5000 followers between both accounts; a mix of musicians, PR agents, and music lovers. We are very grateful for your feedback and for sharing our posts. Thank you.
One hiccup we had during the year was the loss of our thriving Facebook page. We’re currently rebuilding our page, and if you’ve not “liked” our new one, please do so you don’t miss out anything we post.
We could keep on forever but the new year is approaching, so we’ll take this opportunity to wish all of our readers, followers, artists, contacts and supporters a very Happy New Year and a prosperous and musical 2016!Â
