Since April 2007
Welcome to this tiny little corner of the Internet.
YVYNYL (‘why vinyl’) is an independent digital publication featuring noteworthy music, new music-related tracks, visual art, and fascinating musically-tinged stories about life, love, and loss. The site was founded by Philadelphia-based writer and critic Mark Schoneveld, who curates, manages, and edits with an emphasis on curiosity, craft, and compassion.
The Project’s History
While I can’t quite verify the ‘Since April 2007’ date 100% exactly, I point to that time as the moment I signed up for an account on Tumblr, a site that has served as the backbone for this project ever since. Honestly, though, this project’s seeds come from many sources. Its early buds began to bloom when I moved to the Fishtown neighborhood in Philadelphia in the fall of 2005 after working at the Telluride Film Festival that year. My dear college friends - artists, painters, musicians - beckoned me with enticing tales of adventure and raw tenacity. I was ready for the gritty truth of a hard-worn city, a blue-collar city at the heart of the American story.
It was there that I found roots in this city; its charms and challenges. It was there that I dove deeper, deeper, and ever deeper into a relationship with music. As an art form. As a gathering place. As solace. As strength. As excitement. And as forgiveness.
And it was there that I found the tools for sharing my growing enthusiasm, to focus and radiate my passion for creating modern music out to the wide wonderful world online.
When a bunch of us started ‘music blogging’ more than a decade ago, none of us knew what was going to come of it beyond just having fun sharing what we loved. Turned out, a lot of us got hooked and couldn’t stop. It grew like crazy. For me it began when I started videotaping at least one performance at every show I went to in 2006 and 2007. I think. When I look back on this hazy history, I find elements of what I was doing even earlier than that in all various types of web platforms and digitally connected machines.
My Philly friends and I - as well as my growing crew of worldwide Internet buds - started record labels, tuning to house shows, buying ultra-small-run vinyl and homespun cassettes, housing young artists at our houses from far-away cities, going to bonfire parties in backyards. There was a lot of incredible music happening then, and not a whiff of it was not DIY-to-the-bone.
I suppose this is why someone, I can’t remember who exactly, once told me that people started calling me the ‘Grandfather of Music Blogging’ though I chuckle at the nom-de-plume. Maybe. But I was inspired to start music blogging after reading other amazing music websites like Gorilla vs. Bear, Aquarium Drunkard, I Guess I’m Floating, and the always-growing power player publishers at Pitchfork. When Tumblr launched it made the process of writing about the art we loved so simple to share. I was hooked. I still am.
I made a long (and well used) list of music blogs I followed and got to know personally over the years. Most of the people are no longer blogging about music - some got great jobs in the music biz, others just wanted out altogether, a few of them you’ll recognize now as thought leaders in this crazy hyper-changing industry. Most of them shared the passion, the love for the wild-west-ness of music blogging in the early days.
Many of the artists who I was blessed to become friends with, to see play live in a living room, to get first pressing vinyl from them as a trade seems to be the fabric of this life. It is wild to me that I made my old neighbors The War on Drugs’ very first music video (goddamn, did Adam just win the freakin’ Best Rock Album at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards?). Did my other neighbor Kurt Vile become the darling of Matador Records? Did I really see Angel Olsen play solo on her first ever tour in a tiny yoga studio in West Philly? Did I hang out with Mac DeMarco (then performing as Makeout Videotape) after playing to an audience of five people at an art space in Kensington? Can’t hardly believe I saw my buds Purity Ring’s play their first-ever live show at our first #MEGABLAAG in Austin in 2011, artists who started out as bloggers themselves. Did all this really happen?
Oh, and #MEGABLAAG! Thanks to the help of my friend Peter Arko (RIP Ears of the Beholder blog) and I put our minds together to start throwing events at SXSW and CMJ with the idea that we’d have a chill time and place to bring all the music bloggers who’d be in Austin and New York City for industry events. Many friendships made there continue to this day. Its a side-project of which both Peter and I are incredibly proud. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the initial support of these parties if not for the help of outstanding-but-now-defunct music app Ex.fm. After that, we worked with our friends at the Hype Machine to keep music blogs surfing a wave of legitimacy and relevance in those heady years.
If you’re curious, here are links from my “Best Music Blogs” in 2009 and 2010 to get a good sense of what is and is not still alive and well. If I ever get my act together, I’ll share who I ‘follow’ now, but truthfully, the whole idea of music blogging may have had its five minutes of fame. As the rest of the media industry will tell you, the digital music space is monopolized by a handful of players, and even those folks still don’t truly have a clue what to do with music. But even in these rough and tumble times, here I am, chugging along with the rest of them, albeit slower and a bit less methodically.
What’s the future look like? I dunno. You tell me! If you’re reading this, maybe you have a blog? Maybe you do something else? You throw shows? You have a scene you’d like to talk about with me and my crew? My blog still supplies me with tens of thousands of emails every week, mostly from PR companies big and small. However, I still get amazing personally crafted letters from artists about their art and music, which I still try to share when I have the chance. Not gonna lie, that slush pile only gets bigger and bigger by the day, unread. Though, by all means, send me an email to pitch me some ideas if you like. I’m always game for a minute to chat with fellow dreamers.
Personal
While I use this platform to explore the evolution of popular social music, experimental art and the power of instant, global self-publishing, I am otherwise up to no good crafting written forms as a novelist, essayist, memoirist, and poet.
If you’ve read this far, you may as well know, I’m a chill dad of three powerful young humans. My wife and I now live just a skip and a jump outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the United States, Earth.
