So over the past several months, I’ve been really thinking about what I have always wanted my music site to be, and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve sat down and made some notes about things I want to change, things I want to upgrade, things I want to introduce and more. And I thought I’d talk a little bit about it with you.
First off, I will be cleaning up the charts area of the site. I was recently looking at things, and as cool as it is to finally have (almost) all my years of personal charts on the site, they really do look TERRIBLE! LOL! My handwriting is atrocious, and always has been. So I’ve constructed a template, and will be phasing in newly typed versions of all the charts as I have them now, so that they are more legible and easier to read, plus I will begin a cross-referencing database for all the entries on my chart that will eventually lead to me publishing some kind of Whitburn-ish looking reference book to the TKR charts over the years, probably two or three years down the road. I’m hoping to have the newly typed up versions of all the charts finished by the end of the year, but time can get away from me, so if I don’t make it – there’s THIRTEEN years of charts to do now, plus 1978 and 1979 if I can ever find them – don’t hold that against me…heh heh
Second, I will FINALLY launch the TKR Missing Years project that I’ve talked about off and on since 2018. The Missing Years project is my own personal need to have charts for ALL the years since I launched TKR in the summer of 1978 (although 1978 and 1979 are still missing, hopefully they’ll turn up one day…). Using the Record Research library of books (most notable the printed Hot 100 charts for the 1990s forward) and my extensive notes, I will be going back and completing charts for those missing years, in chronological order – 1993-1998, 2000-2009, late 2010 to 2018, and 2018-present. The goal for completing this massive project is December 31st, 2025; although I hope to have it finished well before that date, I am being realistic in the amount of time I actually can devote to this project, and that will give me plenty of cushioning to get things done.
Third, I am hoping to relaunch the TKR charts sometime soon, and once again, I will be trying to do what I’m listening to now, and following my basic rules – if I don’t have it, it doesn’t make my chart. So anyone who is simply streaming be warned – if I can’t access and download your song for my collection, or purchase the physical media of it, it won’t be making the chart, and it won’t be in my reference library when I’m done; beginning with the launch of the newest charts, if I don’t own it, it won’t be on my chart-centric media channels (Spotify and a few others I’m working on) either. I am not sure of the size of the chart as yet – in 2018 it expanded to 75 spots, and one of the reasons it died after just six months or so was that I discovered I wasn’t completely comfortable with that many songs on the chart, so I will decide what I’m going to do as I go along – I think it’s most likely to return to 50 spots as the 2010 charts had, but we’ll see how things go.
OK, enough about my charts. Let’s move onto something else that has become a true passion of mine – the long-running Eurovision Song Contest and its progeny, Junior Eurovision and the American Song Contest. I will be developing and launching a historical database for each of these contests and launch a menu section devoted to each of these. The history of Eurovision is fascinating when you dig into it, and when you see all the fantastic songs that have come and gone over the years, it’s an amazing group of people, styles, and presentations that have graced those stages for nearly seventy years now. I will be reaching out to Eurovision fans for their assistance in the weeks ahead so that I can try to amass as much info about the national selection processes as well, and make sure some of that is also covered here. It’s my hope to have this area of my site launch in segments over the next year, and have it fully completed in time for Eurovision 2023, wherever it may be held. Because it is just starting, and will be easier to do from the get-go, I will launch the American Song Contest section first, and plan to have it done within a week or two after this year’s contest concludes on May 9th 2022. This area of the site will also have year by year coverage of ESC, JESC, and ASC as it has appeared on my site, with links to the songs, and my annual reviews and such. I may also try to launch an Amazon store with the music from each show, we’ll see.
Next up, regular columns. Back in 2019, I announced a host of regular columns I was planning to do, and some of them have popped up here and there, and a lot of them ended up becoming a part of my video channel, TKR VideoCentral. But I still want to launch most of them, so you can go back and see what I had planned back then by checking out the list I made back then.
OK, let’s talk YouTube – in 2020, I launched TKR VideoCentral as part of YT’s Vinyl Community, and it has helped re-energize my love of collecting to the point that I’ve doubled my LP collection in less than two years. It is my intent to continue to log what I have on Discogs, and make that public and available so that people can check out my collections and want lists, and such, but I am also going to index the various videos I’ve made over the last two years, and devote an entire section of the site to that index – all the general videos, and the ones I’m doing now. If you haven’t come over to the YouTube site please do – come over, like and subscribe, and leave comments, it’s always appreciated! And if by chance you’ve discovered TKR by watching my videos, welcome to my full site!
There’s even more on the horizon, but a lot of it is still in the planning stages or in the works, including a new sister site I’ll be asking for the public’s help on doing – more on this later in the week – and so I’ll talk about it more when those things become more tangible and get ready for the site or the YouTube channel. In any case, I hope as always you’ll stay around for the ride, and become a devoted fan of TKR and what I do. It’s because of my love of music and radio that I want to share with others that love, and I hope you will enjoy what you see.