Ad Hoc Music Blogger Collective Rises From Ashes Of Pitchfork’s Altered Zones

Given the recent two part interview with Drowned In Sound's Sean Adams (Part 1 and 2) on the state of music blogging, yesterday's launch of Ad Hoc with an initial post titled Things We Hate About Blogging seems rather timely. Ad Hoc is a new music blogging and zine collective that emerged from the ashes of Pitchfork's Altered Zones project. A successful Kickstarter campaign proved the depth of fan support and they appear to be off to a strong start.

Pitchfork launched Altered Zones in the summer of 2010. It was a blog collective composed of representatives from a wide range of music blogs. Altered Zones ended in December 2011 and Ad Hoc seems intent on going beyond what Altered Zones accomplished.

Pitch Video for Ad Hoc's Kickstarter Campaign

Ad Hoc's first look was a Kickstarter Campaign that had a goal of $33,333 and raised $37,626 with an awe-inspiring 973 backers. While the above video gives one a sense of the blogger involvement, the Kickstarter page also gives a sense of the community support. It clearly runs deep with not only a healthy crew of bloggers and a huge number of pledges but also a long list of artists who contributed music to a cassette box set and an even longer list of labels that contributed bundles of records, CDs and/or cassettes. Quite impressive!

A FAQ at the bottom of the page reveals that the money will go to a variety of expenses, including the production of a quarterly print zine, as well as payments to contributors. However, editors Emilie Friedlander and Ric Leichtung "will not be collecting a salary from the publication until it becomes a self-sustaining entity." They will be supporting themselves "primarily through freelance gigs and odd jobs."

I have to say I'm impressed by the editors' transparency, attention to detail and ability to bring together such a wide range of participants and supporters.

Since I don't travel in the same web circles as these folks, I was alerted to the existence of Ad Hoc by a random encounter with an article by Chase Kamp. It's worth checking out to get a better sense of the apparent sincerity of the editors and their take on this project. Kamp also wrote an earlier piece that alerted me to another new music blog collective called Portals.

Ad Hoc got off to an odd start with a post titled Things We Hate About Blogging. I guess Ad Hoc is, in part, a corrective to some of those things though problems with PR spam predate the very existence of blogging.

The editors say they will also be featuring writing by musicians so Ad Hoc should provide quite an array of voices going beyond even the potentially expansive nature of a collective of geographically dispersed bloggers.

Hypebot Features Writer Clyde Smith maintains his business writing hub at Flux Research and blogs about dance at All World Dance. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.