Why / How Breaking More Waves Blog Is Changing In 2016

2016 is almost around the corner and with it comes some changes at Breaking More Waves…

I’ve decided to make this blog a little more personal. Breaking More Waves has always been just me (Hi, my name’s Robin, in case you didn’t know, pleased to meet you) but since its early stages  I’ve written as if I was denoting not only myself, but others, using the royal ‘we’. 

That is until now.

I’m changing from ‘we’ to ‘I’. 

It might not sound like much, but it reflects a broader change in the future direction of Breaking More Waves. Here’s an explanation:

When I started writing Breaking More Waves I knew very little about music blogs. I didn’t know about Hype Machine, ‘tastemakers’, or that blogging was the new journalism, I just wrote it as a fun thing to do. I never expected many people to read it. It was just a hobby. 

Then over time the blog started getting recognised. I was asked to be a pundit on the BBC Sound of 2010 list, I was asked to participate on various features and shows on radio stations both local and national, my blog started getting quoted in the national press and I got asked to sit on various panels connected with the music industry as some sort of ‘expert’. Now arguably I do have expertise in pop music – I’ve been listening to the stuff for long enough now to build up a fair amount of knowledge. However, I never intended, expected or wanted the blog to be recognised in this way. And sometimes, with the blog being taken ‘seriously’ comes a loss of fun in its creation and a loss of being able to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. The hobby almost became a small part-time job; and I already have enough work in my life. I don’t want any more.

So I’m taking Breaking More Waves back to its roots.

In 2016 Breaking More Waves will be more of a personal-public diary centred around music than just a source of discovery and recommendation. I’ll still be writing about new music (it is after all one of my main obsessions) but I’ll also be writing whatever I want, whenever I want. That means looking backwards as much as it means looking forwards. Rather than gaining focus, I’m going to lose it. 

There will be less posts, with more variation in what they cover. If I want to write about why the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and Disintegration albums by The Cure mean so much to me nearly 30 years after their respective releases, or why taking my 16 year old daughter to Latitude Festival in 2015 was my favourite weekend of the year and how it made me love her even more than I already did, or how I once followed one of Sweden’s  second finest pop exports The Cardigans all around the country on their UK tour I will. Likewise if I want to write 40 words or 4,000 words on why the new tune from the latest shit hot amazing hype band from Brooklyn is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G I will. There will be no rules, no boundaries. After all, I have no editor to please, no advertisers to keep happy, no one funding what I do, no desire to gain hits, no reason to be the coolest or most respected new music blogger, no rule book stating what a music blogger should or shouldn't do, no need to be bigger or better than anyone else - I’ve always been a blogger with no ambition, I have enough of that in the rest of my life. 

I just want to enjoy the process of creating Breaking More Waves, making sure it’s just a hobby, and this is my way of getting back to that.