1,500th Post

This post will be the 1,500th post since the launch of the blog in 2009, and the 1,410th since its relaunch in March 2020.

It is just over a year since I reactivated the blog and consolidated it with another 'neglected' blog 'Modern Soul'. It was initially started to post vintage rare soul, mainly Northern Soul, Crossover and Modern Soul. At the start of 2021 I decided to focus on new independent soul releases and fill void periods with lesser known and classic vintage soul.

The blog is beginning to build a reputation with several artists leaving comments on posts and sending me material to review and was recently voted in Top 40 Soul Music Blogs, Websites & Influencers in 2021 by Feedspot (currently #32). This week has seen the highest viewing figures with 14,000 visitors. I wish to thank you for visiting the blog and ask you to share it and spread the word. My goal is to make this the 'go to' site to discover new soul releases. I welcome comments, suggestions and recommendations and am happy to promote new releases from artists and labels and to promote relevant radio shows, just drop me a comment or contact me at soulstrutter@gmail.com.

The blog couldn't exist without the YouTube community who post the music as I simply wouldn't have time to create all the videos and post them on YouTube and the blog, so I acknowledge and thank all those whose videos I feature. 

I make best endeavours to post videos for new releases from official sources so that the creators of the music receive streaming royalties, however these are paltry. As an example, I featured Soul Sonic's single on day of release (5 Mar) and to date it has received 87.25m views - at the last rate I can find for YouTube, they pay $0.00069 per view, so out of 87.25m views it generated only $60k (probably doesn't even cover the cost of making the video!). Spotify pays $0.00437 and Amazon $0.00402 so I may start embedding from Spotify in future (where possible) as it pays more than six times the amount to the music creators!

With that in mind, if we hear music we like it is incumbent upon us to support the creators by buying the music. It has never been cheaper at 99p per digital track. If artists don't make money they can't make music and the inevitable consequence will be a landscape of oldies and constant regurgitations, remixes, reworkings of old songs or a small band of mainstream artists and corporate labels feeding us what they think we want and I'm sure none of us want that!