commendation for outstanding service to human race: resident advisor

i guess it's optimised for phones but it looks lame on this screen

lame and pointless and the write-up they've published on how/why they did it is awful

A lot about RA has come to make more sense since I realized that they probably make most of their money off ticket sales, so my guess is it has more to do with reorganizing the back-end to serve ticket sales and orienting users toward engaging more with that aspect of the site. It kind of just looks more like FACT and Pitchfork ca mid 2015s, kind of boring and pretty inoffensive, but hard to see it inspiring strong feelings in any direction. I dunno if it's pointless as much as web technology evolves extremely quickly and websites change.

Apparently DJs are mad that they got rid of their DJ charts, which I never looked at. How did those work?

they were at the bottom of the page, they were literally just lists with no links, they often had (Unreleased) by the names of songs, completely pointless

Did DJs just make their own lists, or were they generated from tracklists somehow?

they were dj-submitted, but I got the impression they were very sporadically updated

I sometimes checked DJ charts back in, like 2008, before countless better ways of sharing tracks were common. Lately it was mostly generic tech-house or business techno DJs who probably gained more from having having their name visible on the homepage. I'm sure a few people check them but they are pretty pointless, and my feeling is that DJs that are actually mad probably need to bring their ego down.

by last year, there was an entire ongoing debate about tracking of played tracks, digital paythrough, attribution, etc. and it’s probably easier at this point to sidestep the entire business by just putting the track lists on the podcast dj sets and ignore the rest entirely

RA can do no right these day.
Problem is, with the demise of the blogs, there's almost nowhere to go for electronic music news / reviews / articles etc.

it's good to see they put all that government money they got to such good use.

there's almost nowhere to go for electronic music news / reviews / articles etc

really?!?

In their post about the new site they said that the Arts Council grant wasn't used for this.

xp I can hardly think of any. FACT has gone to shit. The Quietus is good but not exclusively dance. Crack Magazine is okay. The Ransom Note is okay but can't say I look at it much. That's about it. But I'm open to recommendations.

yeah a few months ago i was like "i'm looking forward to the fact year-end list" and only last week did i realize fact is now a completely different website

sucks

Yeah, Fact is basically just a YouTube channel now

I can hardly think of any. FACT has gone to shit. The Quietus is good but not exclusively dance. Crack Magazine is okay. The Ransom Note is okay but can't say I look at it much. That's about it. But I'm open to recommendations

just checking my bookmarks, i visit these websites semi-regularly (the ones at the top once a week, the ones at the bottom once every couple of months if that):

Vinyl Factory:
https://thevinylfactory.com/

Stamp The Wax:
https://www.stampthewax.com/

Test Pressing:
https://testpressing.org/

Hyponik:
https://hyponik.com/

Dummy:
https://www.dummymag.com/

Self-Titled:
https://www.self-titledmag.com/

XLR8R:
https://xlr8r.com/

and yes, i am conscious that selection is almost definitely lacking in a diversity of voices, so recommendations outside of that pov would be welcome

Yup Test Pressing is great. Forgot about that one. Will check the others thanks.

also Attack magazine, but that's mostly music tech:

https://www.attackmagazine.com/

ok. i withdraw my comment about the government money.

i guess all the sites i was going to mention get mentioned above. there aren't a ton i'll concede but deffo a fair few. i guess it is dependent on what way one's taste skews.

To be fair, FACT was always pretty shitty.

in its defence, it was shitty in quite an interesting way. also chal ravens was/is awesome

FACT was great in its original incarnation.

Who could resist stuff like this? - https://www.factmag.com/2010/11/02/20-best-goth/

also chal ravens was/is awesome

I second this.

https://banbantonton.com/ was a recent discovery for me that I'll recommend for mostly balearic coverage. I will stan for FACT under Kiran Sande's editorial reign when they threw enough curveballs into the listicle/clickbait content to keep things interesting.

banbantonton is nice, it's one of the old testpressing guys I think

yeah BBTT is Dr Rob formerly of Test Pressing.

Stamp The Wax is good, their Monday mixtapes are excellent. In general I tend to follow writers than sites though - for every decent Ravens piece on RA there's one of those terrible no-insight Rewind reviews that seems generated by AI.

I still remember when FACT ran that "top ten gayest Ritchie Hawtin moments" article, hard to take them seriously since.

Have only ever read Chal in places other than RA.

Chal is great. Sometimes I look at Insert for tracks. Electronicbeats.net had some good editorial for a little while. Bandcamp editorial has some good round-up columns, not a lot of writing though (just short capsules). Mostly I just follow people on Twitter and Bandcamp (good for actually finding music, but yeah music writing is in a scattered and sorry state rn). Seems like some good writers are moving to the newsletter format though.

Ray Philp is another name who'll I will always read

"Who'll I will" I don't even know what grammatic rule I was trying to follow there

Thanks so much for all these recommendations. I also was lost on good sites for electronic music since music blogs died. ResidentAdvisor used to be the one I frequented the most but I don’t think I got too much out of it in 2020.

to be fair I don't think anyone was getting much of dance music culture in 2020 and everywhere seems to have a pivot towards music designed for home-listening (as if you can't and wouldn't listen to Proper Dancing Music around the house etc)

i'll second Ray Philp too.

Oh and how could I forget TRUANTS
http://truantsblog.com/

And the Bandcloud newsletter is great, although I certainly don't always have time to go through it.

i realize this has been discussed but wowww the new RA redesign... holy shit is it dull to look at. it's reminiscent of default wordpress themes circa 2016. thank u to all who posted links to alternatives, i will be visiting them.

other than the mix series RA is useless to me now that they abandoned the tracks feature. do any of these other sites have something similar? just soundcloud links to like 10-20 new tracks a day posted with minimal description. tracks was a good midpoint between beatport which is too much of a hose to the face for me and their reviews section which is too curated

best i can recommend is to follow a bunch of labels and artists you like on soundcloud, and use this greasemonkey script to hide reposts so you only see what they're originally posting: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/13566-soundcloud-hide-reposts

it's dumb that you can't just hide reposts on SC without this hack. the stream/timeline is useless to me without it. (n.b., it's a bit janky and you might have to reload the stream page for it to kick in.)

hm that’s a nice hack thx

i haven’t used it in a while but SoundCloud app was pretty bad last time i checked

they're looking for a new Editor In Chief.

they need front-end dev who could implement a dark mode for the site

finally: https://ra.co/podcast/769

Great little vid about Tech House: https://ra.co/features/3851
It wasn't always shit.

https://ra.co/news/76839

According to a tweet by Lee's colleague and friend Kenneth Takanami, who DJs and makes music under his given name, Lee joined Splice around the time of the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021, which left six Asian women dead. Lee was passionate about supporting the Asian community in music and about combating racism and appropriation. She also loved vinyl.

jesus christ that’s terrible framing and writing

I'm into this

https://ra.co/podcast/849

I'm into this

https://ra.co/podcast/849🕸🕸

Looking forward to that but I'm still working my way through the Nikki Nair mix (which is fantastic)