Fresh On The Net
Hello, happy spring! I was recently invited to be a guest moderator for Fresh On The Net during the week of 21st March (my birthday!). First off, a huge thank you to the wonderful MIRI for nominating me for this fabulous opportunity! Fresh On The Net is an independent music blog founded by BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Tom Robinson in 2009. Over the years it's evolved into an online community of music enthusiasts with a wide range of tastes and ages. Their mission is to help independent musicians find new listeners, and independent listeners find new music. Here’s how it works:
“Our inbox for music submissions opens on Monday. If you’re an artist you’re welcome to send us a tune, and at least a dozen of us (including Tom) listen to every single track that comes in. We close the inbox when we reach 200 submissions or on Wednesday evening, whichever is sooner. We always post our entire inbox as a SoundCloud playlist – so you can hear your music in context alongside everything else that came in that week.
We then publish 25 of our favorite tunes from the inbox on our Listening Post every weekend for readers to enjoy and evaluate. We add up their votes every Sunday night and the tunes our readers like best become our Fresh Faves – and are duly reviewed by one of us the following week.”
Team Freshnet
As a guest moderator, I listened to all 183 tracks submitted to Fresh On The Net that week and selected my top five (plus a number of additional likes). Overall, 10 of my picks made it through to the Listening Post (including three of my five main picks!), with many of the artists I chose being from under-represented groups. Three of my favourite tracks got radio play on BBC Radio 6 Music: Toby Corton “Bitterness,” Amy Fitz Doyley “Eye Of The Needle” and Junkyard of Silenced Poets “Parasite Lost” - check them out in the BBC Music Introducing Mixtape with Tom Robinson here and here (available on BBC Sounds for a limited time only!). Amy Fitz Doyley has also just won the RSD Unsigned competition and I’m really pleased that she will have her music pressed to 500 vinyl records.
The 10 most popular Fresh On The Net tracks got featured and reviewed the following week for Fresh Faves. I also enjoyed reading about these Eclectic Picks and the Happy Somethings’ Collective Picks, as well as this interview with Caitlyn Scarlett (whose new track “Forgive Yourself” with Her Ensemble made my long list!).
Fresh On The Net make a conscious effort to help get gender balance in the independent music scene. At a rough count about 25% of all submissions I listened to during the week of 21st March were by female musicians. So, if you happen to be a woman in music reading this blog post: SUBMIT YOUR TRACK! If you don’t submit your track, there’s no chance for your music to get heard. You’re enough, right now, so please submit those tracks.
