4th 'Ambient Playlist Blog' Anniversary!

The 'Ambient Playlist Blog' has been your place to discover atmospheric music playlists for four years now already! Thank you very much for still being here with me, taking inspiration in all new playlists showing up here on a regular basis and enjoying the music by so many great artists - and not to forget enjoying the work of so many great curators who put together all these playlists!

These four years went by so fast, it's absolutely crazy and unbelievable! I've seen so many new music projects rise up and many fade away, new curators pushing forward to bring value to the community while many others just vanished, leaving their playlists abandoned like monuments from a past long gone, freezing their current music taste in time, to be forgotten and maybe rediscovered again one day.

I probably should have abandoned this blog two years ago. Yet I carry on, for the people who from time to time send me messages and let me know that this blog really helps them to successfully reach out to curators with their own music! It has never been so tough to struggle with this task during my free time, considering the whole playlist thing becoming more and more difficult since two years, with all the "premiumification" of pitching websites. As you know, there are only playlists on this blog which feature my own music and are therefore (at least were at the time of placement here) free to pitch to, as I don't support payola or the whole "the artist as a customer" premium service landscape which evolved drastically during the last two years and almost leaves no room for artists to efficiently pitch to playlist curators without having to pay for it. For me it was always about connecting with people, bringing them together to grow together and not about urging artists (who create the art in the first place!) to pay for a slim chance to maybe get heard.
Everything is tilted again in "music business" toward the business side, while we still believe we're all independent artists.

Anyway, this situation makes it even harder for me to get on some good playlists with my own Ambient project and therefore it's even harder every year to present good playlists here on the 'Ambient Playlist Blog' on a regular basis. This year was a stretch already and getting it all done anyhow unfortunately takes away so much of my available time, which - to be honest - would be better spend with actually making more music, working on bigger projects to raise the bar and get to a level where all of this maybe has some greater impact at some point.

With this dilemma I'll go into the fifth year of the blog, with a lack of energy, time and a missing perspective for continuing it, but not wanting to quit it for good either. If anyone wants to help on an occasional basis with setting up new posts or keeping old ones up to date, I'd be happy for it! I keep everything up on schedule as good as I can with preparing batches of playlist posts but even that becomes more of a struggle recently, with either too much work at a time or long stretches without enough playlists to post. We'll see what the future brings.

I wish all of you a very, very Happy New Year! Thank you very much for yet another year of Ambient playlists and listening to atmospheric music!

- Simon | Imagine The Sea