Jazz Near You Turns 10

Fresh off All About Jazz's 25th anniversary, we celebrate Jazz Near You's 10th year. AAJ has been a journey through the evolution of the commercial internet and the challenge to keep pace with shifting technologies, while continuously pushing the envelope for jazz awareness and discovery. The heft of All About Jazz is undeniable and the importance of Jazz Near You grows with each passing year.

Jazz Near You's origin story began when musicians (friends) voiced their collective concern about their precipitous drop in CD sales, insufficient streaming revenue and the need to make up the difference with live performances and taking on more students.

Local information was accessible at All About Jazz for a few years, but it appeared below the fold (of a page) or a click or two off the home page—meaning it always took a back seat to our album reviews, interviews and our other content currently found on the AAJ home page.

The decision to spin off the local content (events, venues, festivals and other local businesses, and a musician & teacher finder) and create something separate from All About Jazz made sense, and to my surprise, the domain jazznearyou.com was still available, so I quickly purchased it and got to work on the new website. It took about a year to build Jazz Near You and over the last decade we've introduced new features, functionality and further refined its appearance.

JNY is comprised of hundreds of city websites—from Paris to San Francisco to Melbourne—and though it stands alone as a separate entity (and is now home to over 50,000 business listings worldwide), it is fully integrated with All About Jazz and shares the same log in. It's why you see events listed on a musician page and why you see musicians (and their photos & instruments) listed on an event page.

Like All About Jazz, Jazz Near You is an ongoing endeavour with some exciting developments on the horizon. I'll post about them in the coming months. Until then, if you have upcoming shows, upload them to Jazz Near You so we can help you promote them. Listing events is free but if you're looking for additional promotion, consider our Event Spotlight service. It's still $40 and the promotional window covers five weeks.

Continue...

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Posted to Publisher's Desk IN THE Jazz Near You GROUP
Read more posts by Michael Ricci