the New, New Music

As readers of this blog know Publicbroadcasting.ca touches on a variety of things - Canadian art, culture, public broadcasting, politics, journalism and other. As most of you also know, or will have noticed. I have a particular soft spot for music. There is always more going on than I have time for. I could do 20-30 posts a day about music alone. Sadly I don't have the time to do that, so I'm asking for help and launching a new project, along with a new site and I'm looking for a lot of help.

Once registration is verified and I have time to build the site I will be launching North by East West (NXEW) - an obvious if geographically impossible play on the SXSW and NXNE festivals. The hope is to cover Canadian music with a network of bloggers and a rapid fire micro-blogging style. (Not as micro as Twitter, I don't think Twitter will have a long life but that's another topic for another day.) I'm aiming for something closer to Boing Boing - a paragraph or two of info, maybe a quote and links plus media where possible (video, audio, pics etc). So it will cover upcoming shows and tours, new releases, hilight articles from other spots, new videos (including live video) etc., etc.,

What I am looking for is bloggers, lots of bloggers. As I've said the posts will be short, it won't take much time and will allow you to talk about what's going on locally. Ideally I'd like to have people from every major population centre in Canada (even some in the US if there are people there content to talk about Canadian music pretty exclusively.) There is no funding in place. That may come down the road but such is the way of new media that it first needs to demonstrate value and find an audience.

Pretty much everyone is eligible. It seems to me that many of the most knowledgeable people about Canadian music are involved with it and that everyone has their bias' - some just hide it better than others. So I'm not too worried about conflict of interest (this is music not politics.) Having said that if you decide to participate and if you decide to say that "_________ is the best new band in Canada" do make it clear that you're their bass player (or whatever.)

If you are interested in participating you can, for the time being, say so in the Facebook group NxEW.ca should be, to some degree, up this week.