Looking backwards (2023 recap)

 

What a curious year that was.

I was starting out from a peculiar position anyway: having finally done in 2022 what I had vaguely promised to do for years - resume posting on here - I had then (predictably enough) run out of steam at the end of that year, and apparently I carried this inertia into 2023 with me. It was a slow start, and not a promising one. But it's true what they say: sometimes just reorganising your environment can help to achieve the same effect internally, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much of a difference it made to have all my Braxtoniana within (relatively) easy reach at long last. The focus which I had been sorely lacking then seemed to align itself into place, and in March I was finally able to deliver a piece of writing which had been gestating for more than twenty-one months. (This in turn confirmed a long-held supposition: that the more detail I include in a post, the fewer people are likely to read it*. Long-gestating it may have been, but when it finally arrived it was very slow to acquire page-views...)

March was an odd month in general, as I found myself needing to take a step back in my working life, and spent a few weeks away from work while a move to a different department was arranged behind the scenes: this allowed me time to write, and also to read; however, from April onwards what I found was that my continuing attention to B's music came at the expense of my reading, which itself died off almost completely for the next few months. I don't know about anybody else, but I only have so much "mental bandwidth" available, and the change of role at work - which entailed assimilating lots of new information - limited what I could do with my downtime, beyond simply decompressing. I managed to keep posting at a decent rate, but I almost stopped reading altogether. Pretty much anything I do, it seems, requires a certain degree of obsessiveness if I am to do it with any sort of success.

You can fairly well map out what happened after that by glancing at the blog's post count for the rest of the year. By the end of August, I was getting fed up with the piles of unread books and began trying to redress the balance, which meant a dip in the blogging activity. By the end of October, I was reading a lot more avidly again - and you don't have to be a genius to figure out what that meant. Only while I was absent from work was I able to maintain both interests at once. So it came about that a year which I thought for several months might end up being the most productive ever seen in the history of the blog eventually fell some way short; still, 57 posts is far more than we managed in any previous year, except only for 2008. The renewed interest of McClintic Sphere had a lot to do with this, for sure. As for my own stated intentions, I was able to follow through on some of these, while others have remained on my to-do list. And speaking of lists: I put together a long-overdue "most wanted" list, and promptly acquired about two thirds of the items thereupon... I also heard a huge proportion of the digital-only releases from New Braxton House, which I had been putting off for years and years. 

What I never came close to achieving is a greater understanding of how the blog's traffic works, at this late stage of its maturity. At times it seemed as if I could at least be sure that increased posting activity led directly to more page-views, but that has by no means always been the case. Daily "hits" have varied from almost none at all (i.e. 1 - 5) to some number too large to comprehend: I thought June had gone crazy when I started to see daily spikes of 200 or more, and a monthly total in excess of 5,000; but September saw more than 13,000 page-views, and by the last third of that month the daily count was well into four figures. This makes no sense at all: at the height of C#9's popularity, back in the Golden Age of Music Blogging, it was racking up about a thousand hits a day, and of course we were posting actual music files back then, as well as maintaining a lively discussion in the comments section. To see that level of activity exceeded by a special-interest site, on a marginalised and outmoded platform, offering nothing more than written analysis of music which isn't even being offered to the reader (and is, in many cases, not exactly readily available)... is beyond my ability to understand. Clearly the activity is not all human - indeed, in the "mad months" the activity must have been mainly "bot-driven" -  but even then, how this actually works, and what factors are responsible for the rollercoaster graph that would represent this year's page-views, are all things just as unknown to me as they were this time last year. (If anything, I can make even less sense of it all now.)

That's fine, though. However illusory it may be, the sense that "someone is reading" keeps me from feeling as if I am merely wasting my time; and I do know that a few actual, real people do continue to read, for which I am grateful; and besides, my own stark limitations as an amateur musicologist prevent me from being tempted to switch to a more contemporary platform (you know - the type where people actually try to monetise their stuff). I have written enough already about these limitations, not out of modesty but rather with a view to (re)setting expectations; my lack of formal musical training did overshadow much of my writing this year, and it will continue to do so from now on. Still, that won't stop me from wrestling with the problem, or from continuing to delve into the maestro's work. I am, as they say, in it for the long haul... here's to 2024!

* This puts me in good company, of course - as B. himself could attest. As a general rule of thumb: the more time and effort that goes into any human endeavour, the less anyone will be inclined to pay any attention to the results. Whether it surprises me that such a rule should extend to something as specialised as this blog, and its output, is another question. But given that I didn't post a rip of the Thumbscrew covers album along with the article, and that not everyone will have a copy (or otherwise be able to hear it), it is probably natural enough that few people were seduced by the prospect of an overly long and detailed analysis of said album...