Nextbop is at a crossroad. Last month, A Blog Supreme, NPR’s jazz blog which we held in very high regards, closed up shop. A Blog Supreme, which was coincidently started the same year as Nextbop, had been to this date the stalwart of all jazz blogs. Its shuttering leads us to question our very existence as well as the financial viability of jazz blogs in general. Search & Restore, Elements of Jazz, Alternate Takes are just but a few of our friends who no longer operate. We believe our mission is vital to the jazz community yet the internet hasn’t to date found a proper way to remunerate blogs in an online world where more and more people expect things to be free. While we have had some ad revenue here and there, we haven’t had anything consistent enough to support our staff or ourselves. It became necessary to try something different in addition to conventional routes.
This is why we are reaching out to our avid fans for support. We need your help to ensure we can keep providing quality content on a regular basis. We have set up a Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/nextbop) in order to collect monthly donations from the people who value what we do the most. And in order to make things a little more enticing for our donors, we are in parallel organizing our first annual jazz raffle with a ton of cool prizes from some of the industry’s leading musicians and labels. Basically pledging to our Patreon garners you entries in our raffle and odds are you’ll win something given the amount of prizes.
Our goal is to raise at least $1,000 a month in order to provide fair wages to our writers, our most prized asset. Nextbop received 60,000 visitors last year. If only a fraction of those people cared enough about what we do to donate even just $1 a month our objective would be easily achieved.
So if you’re a reader who visits our website regularly, if you’re an artist we’ve promoted in the past, if you’re a label we’ve talked about, if you’re a publicist who’s benefited from our work, please consider making a donation. We value you and we are counting on you. Thank you for your support.
2016 NEXTBOP JAZZ RAFFLE PRIZES
– Autographed CDs by The Bad Plus, Ben Wendel, Marquis Hill, Stephan Crump, Mark de Clive-Lowe, Glenn Zaleski, Uri Gurvich, Braxton Cook, Corbin Andrick and Mike Casey
– Autographed sheet music by Ben Wendel and Braxton Cook
– Vinyl bundles courtesy of Blue Note Records and Royal Potato Family Records
– CD bundles courtesy of Ropeadope Records
[Contest ends December 7th, 2016]
#SaveNextbop