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It's been a tough 6 months in Live 4 Metal land. Be it writers
that seem to disappear at regular intervals, dying
computers, a deluge of cds or just a stack of business
commitments that leave me no spare time, Live 4 Metal has
been dying on its ass the past few months. I'll openly admit
that at least twice, I've been very close to pulling the
plug on the site, just to get some spare time to spend a few
hours doing inane things... like playing computer games...
which actually is all there is to do apart from Metal,
right? Oh, and drinking copious amounts of alcohol. Which I
don't really do anymore, especially as I just started
working out again this week. Anyway, distractions aside, I'm
going to try and get the site going again to the (high)
standards to which we've always aspired to. If I fail this
time, then at least I've gone out trying rather than with a
pathetic whimper. I've told these problems to a few senior
writers and I'd like to thank all of them for their kind
words of support and the time they've given to try and get
the site back on track.
To keep the site in a more manageable state, we are going
to have to cut down on the number of cds we review. A few
genres are going to be chopped, such as Hardcore and we can
no longer (practically) guarantee a review. Of course the
labels and PR's that have always supported us will be our
priority, as will bands that have sent us material in the
past. Casualties will include poorly produced and presented
material, genres outside of our normal boundaries of
Traditional and Extreme Metal and the download generation of
labels who never supported us in the past as we can only
download so many albums via the ipool system. I guess once
our backlog has been dealt with, we'll be looking at a cap
of between 75 to 100 cds a month. And of the backlog,
unfortunately we won't be able to cover every cd as there
only so many hours in a day available for reviewing cds.
When I launched Live 4 Metal about 8.1/2 years ago,
things were very different. Obviously the site didn't take
up so much of my time, but I had a job I didn't care about,
I was single and I had no real commitments. Now I have my
own business, and a family to support etc... and I don't
have the same energy levels, mainly as I'm an old git now.
Times have changed, and to fit Live 4 Metal into my
schedule, the site has to change and it has to be
re-modelled into something a little slicker and more
manageable.
So once again, my apologies for the past few months of
tardiness and normal service will resume very shortly.
Cheers
Steve
June 2009 |
