tuneage : everyone deserves good music

Tuneage is currently written by 10 music fans, covering a range of genres from indie rock, dubstep, jazz, and electro. But there’s always more, and no matter how dedicated we are, we can’t possibly find it all.

That’s where you come in. We’ve built up an awesome community around our mutual love of music, and we want to tap into that more. We want to make all of you guys contributors too.

The greatest thing a music lover can do for other music lovers is share the wealth. So do us a favour, won’t you? Share the wealth and write us a post.

We’re open to anything: concert and album reviews, audio and video posts, more general posts about a particular genre or scene, and whatever else you can think of. If it’s about music, we’re listening.

Not to get mired in details, but we do have a few guidelines for potential submitters to keep in mind. They’re all on the submissions page, but I’ll reproduce them here too:

• if we publish your post, you will be credited by name and a link (if you provide one).
• As well as a name and link, please also include an e-mail address, in case we need to contact you about your post.
• Try and keep it brief, unless the topic absolutely demands more length. Hopefully you’ve been reading long enough to have a rough idea of our style.
• If you’re submitting an audio post, you’ve probably already noticed that’s impossible: don’t worry about it. We’ll sort out the audio, you just take care of the words.
• We can’t guarantee your submission will be posted, but ultimately, it’s up to you: if your post’s good enough, we’ll publish it.
• If we publish your post, we may make some minor edits to it. We won’t change the meaning of anything you write, we just have some stylistic conventions we like to stick to.
• We don’t pay for posts, though we do put your words in front of thousands of rabid music fans.

Sound good? What are you waiting for?

Typically the Tuneage inbox only gets press-release style e-mails from labels and the occasional music recommendation, but sometimes we get e-mails like this:

Tuneage,
I follow you. I like your blog. But I have a problem I need you to help me solve. I’m burnt out on music that doesn’t rock. I’m going to the jungle in Ecuador to be isolated working for a while in like a week. I need some shit that rips. For reference, some of my favorite bands are Queens of the Stone age (and everything else Josh Homme touches with his holy hand), The Mars Volta, Kings of Leon, and Tom Vek.

I need some now shit to download before I can’t. Any suggestions would be huge man.

Kris

We love e-mail like this for two reasons: it gives the Tuneage team a chance to argue among ourselves about whose taste in music sucks, but also because it gives us a chance to dig through our libraries for stuff we may have been ignoring. So, Kris, here’s what Tuneage recommends:

• Bill: Jay Reatard
• Richard: Late of the Pier and Kyuss
• Matt: Mastodon, specifically Leviathan or Remission
• Dave: The Detachment Kit
• Heather: Jucifer and The Joggers
• Russell: Muse, specifically HAARP and Eagles of Deathmetal, specifically Death by Sexy

And what about you, dear readers? Is there anything else Kris should look into before heading to Ecuador?

Time for another mailbag post. Here’s a selection of the music suggestions that have been e-mailed to us or submitted recently.

• King Crimson
• Florence and the Machine
• Sandro Perri
• Netherfriends
• Minilogue
• Joan As Police Woman
• YACHT
• Tin Cup Prophette
• The Frogs

As ever: Thanks to everyone that’s sent us music. We try to listen to everything we’re sent, so keep them coming!

As you know, our giveaway rules asked you to make us a Muxtape of the perfect Summer mix, and many of you may have noticed that the Muxtapes you made are now empty. Muxtape had some problems over the weekend that they talked about on their tumblelog, but the crux of the problems was this: any Muxtape made in the last three weeks stands a good chance of having lost all its content. Unfortunately, that includes all the entries in our giveaway.

When most of you will have lost the contents of your Muxtape, we think it would be unfair to continue the contest under the same rule set. Regrettably, we’ve decided to revise the giveaway a little.

On the upside, we’re not going to ask you for anything that requires too much thought, like the Muxtapes did; we think that would be unfair since a lot of people have already been through that once. Instead, we want you to suggest a theme for our podcast¹.

We’ll pick our favourite theme, and that person will win our main prize, the iPod, and their pick of 2 other items from the prize list. After that, our next five favourite themes will also get to pick two things from the list.

So if you still want a chance to win something, use /submit to submit your theme ideas. We’ll allow another week after the original deadline (Monday) for this to run.

We recognize this is a huge inconvenience — for you as much as us — and we can’t apologise enough. We’ve learned our lesson, though. None of our future giveaways will rely on any third party service like Muxtape. (And we definitely have more planned, you’ll be glad to hear.)

Thanks for sticking around during this mess. With any luck, we won’t have to deal with a problem like this again. Here’s to plain-sailing in the future.

1: If you’re not familiar with our formula: every week, we choose a theme for the podcast based on whatever Tuneage post was the most reblogged that week. Last week it was a Robyn track, so we chose Swedish acts as the theme. Easy enough, right?

When we announced our giveaway, we said we had something in store for our 1,000th follower and the first 6. Well, we’re not ready announce what’s in store for the first 6 yet, but today we’re going to announce what we have for our 1,000th. Our 1,000th follower was rgrjnr.

So, rgrjnr, whoever you are, we’d like to invite you to pick a prize from the pool (but hands off the iPod, that’s for the contest winner) in the contest post, and write a guest post for us. (Or not, if that works better for you, it’s up to you.) Anyway, send us a message via /submit, and include the prize you want, and your mailing address. And, if you want, your guest post.

Remember that giveaway we’re currently holding? Well, we’ve got some new prizes to add to the pool.

We’ve just added a signed copy of Stoney’s album, The Scene and The Unseen, a signed copy of the latest single from the album, Jailbird, which includes two tracks that aren’t on the album, and a Stoney tour CD, that features 3 tracks by Stoney (one that’s not on the album), and three tracks each by Neil McSweeney & The Gents and The Furze. Oh, and some Stoney stickers. (We posted about Stoney here, if you want to hear what he sounds like.)

That makes more than 20 albums up for grabs. How’s that?

You’ve still got a week to submit your perfect summer mix Muxtape if you want a chance to win these and all the other prizes on offer!