Tuesday May 28th 2019 will be Local Love’s last weekly live broadcast.
First of all, we’d like to thank all of the artists who have sent us all this great music. Without you, the show couldn’t have existed in the first place. And of course all the acts, promoters, and other talented people who have joined us in the studio for a broadcast, the time we spent with you all was amazing and we’ll never forget it. All the listeners, the callers, the people who joined each and every different chat we set up until we eventually settled on Discord. Your support and engagement made this project way more fun. Thanks for the memes and for engaging with us, with the guests, and with each other. The community has been amazing.
Next we’d like to be clear that the Local Love project isn’t “dead”. First of all, Echoplex Radio, which is a direct result of Local Love, is still going to be streaming 24 hours a day and any local artist is still welcome to submit. We use this music on all of our podcast projects, not just Local Love. Also, it’s not as though there will never be another Local Love broadcast. There just won’t be one every Tuesday at 9pm pacific after May 28th.
Now that those things are out of the way, here’s the why. For the last 12 months or so, the trend has been decidedly downward for Local Love, both in live listenership and in podcast downloads and streams. It is currently in the neighborhood of ⅓ to ½ of where we were at about a year ago. Almost all of the engagement in the Discord is folks who started out listening to The Big Show on Sunday and ended up tuning in on Tuesdays because they like the people and the high quality live audio. And of course the music. You don’t have to be local to appreciate the music. But alas, the mission of this show was to engage with the local music and arts community and it seems that we have failed at that mission.
Putting out a show like this every week is a lot of work and attempts to spread the responsibilities for this project around even within our own organization have not been successful. The responsibility for the things that must happen week in and week out have ended up falling on the shoulders of one individual, often times with a scramble on Monday night to crank out both the previous week’s Local Love and the previous night’s The Plex Podcast. No rest for the wicked is not a sustainable model. We don’t have budget to hire anyone and we’d probably rather not have some stranger managing any of it anyway.
We will be having a meeting in the middle of May during which we will try to figure out what this project looks like going forward. This will be posted publicly and will be at a restaurant somewhere in Campbell or Downtown San Jose. You are welcome to attend, even if we’ve never friggin met you.
It’s been hella fun (cuz we’re from the bay, see). Thanks for all the Local Love!
