Alternative Press Website Response
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
Bring Me The Horizon on AP
AltPress.com, the website for the underground music magazine “Alternative Press,” is a great place for news about different types of music, including metal. They have everything from simple tweets and updates toalbum reviews to in-depth features on bands from many genres.
Their top stories list features short news clips, sometimes user submitted, about upcoming album releases, tour dates, band breakups and new streaming songs. This is especially convenient for someone who is in a bit of a hurry but wants to stay in the know about what is going on in the music scene.
The features tab leads to different articles including track-by-track album reviews with band members, standard band features and other interesting pieces including a fantasy band draft. The reviews tab lists the most current albums the website has reviews, gives a one to five star rating and links to the full review on another page.
A strength of this website is the ability is has to focus on underground music specifically. People can go other places to read about music, but bands that most people have never heard of before would be difficult to keep up on if this magazine didn’t exist.
At the same time, this is a weakness as far as the heavy music genre is concerned. Some big guy with a sleeveless t-shirt and black hair down to the middle of his back doesn’t want to hear about bands like Hellogoodbye or The Gay Blades. Because they cover a wide range of underground music, people that specifically like certain genres have to sort through everything to find what they think is important.
One idea to pitch to this website would be to interview different bands and find out what their dream tour would be. Basically, if you could tour with any other two or three bands, who would they be? This would be a great way to getting around asking them boring questions like “who are your biggest influences?” and it would spark the imagination of bands and readers alike.
Another idea could be for back to school time. Something along the lines of (band) + (band) = (band). We could do either whole bands or single members and come up with stuff like New Found Glory + The Devil Wears Prada = A Day To Remember. This would be a good way for readers to find bands they like through others they already know as well as getting kids to love simple math!
One last idea could be following the upcoming AP tour around with a video camera and doing a video blog with weekly updates. Fans love the behind the scenes side of things whenever they can get it, plus it would promote the magazines tour.