The End

A sad post today; I'm closing the doors at chinstroking.com, effective immediately.

The original reason I started this page was for the sole purpose of engaging others with similar musical to myself in discussion. Seeing comments posted, whether good or bad, brightened my spirits, letting me know that strangers out there were reading and listening to what I had to say, which is something everyone likes. Despite visitor numbers fluactuating between 50 and 200 unique visitors a day, the simple lack of comments on the site has been a major disappointment for me considering all the hours I have put into the page.

Perhaps people simply find my material is uninteresting, or perhaps they just don't feel compelled enough to leave comment. That being the case, I still see no good reason to keep things rolling here.

I do wonder if perhaps things were too diverse for people to handle; most individuals are amazingly blinkered when it comes to musical tastes, and perhaps a singular focus on techno, house or trance would have encouraged more people to visit regularly, rather than the broad, fuzzy spectrum I pursued, which also made it harder for me to be knowledgeable about certain labels and trends within each scene.

Secondly, a lame cliche: music is my life. Pure and simple.

This blog has taken away my freedom to explore. I'm just as content to dig up releases from the 1990's as I am to write about brand-new spankers from 2008 and beyond, but it seems that people these days are only content to hear about unreleased or week old stuff. Keeping a handle on all this is incredibly draining, and has reduced my own enjoyment of music immensely. I generally like to listen to a good album for weeks and weeks before moving onto the next thing, and instead I'd been forcing myself to cycle through music as quickly as my memory would allow, just for the sake of passing the news on here, sometimes weeks behind anyway.

Regardless of these two factors, I have enjoyed chinstroking.com immensely at times. I'm extremely proud of some of the articles I've written here, and not so proud of some.

I've enjoyed worshipping or dismantling DJs, dissecting tunes and soliloquizing about pointless developments in technology and musical trends. There is possibility that I will continue to write for other websites on a small time basis - but at this stage it seems unlikely.

I hope some of you enjoyed my writing, because that's the only reason I ever wrote - for your entertainment.

I'll still be available on email (beatblog [at] gmail.com) for contact purposes.

Thanks.

Nick

p.s I'm not quite sure how long I have until my registration on this domain name expires, but I'd expect that when that happens, pages will revert to being hosted at the old address, www.infobeat.blogspot.com.