Frontiers and Melodic Rock.com have a nasty break-up

[zacharyamelie]

The worst part for me is that 75% of the cd's I buy are first heard on MR.com and are on the Frontiers records label.

 

Anyways, the two have had a fallout and MR.com is no longer posting anything about Frontiers.

 

As a music lover and consumer....this sucks! Like 2015 wasn't a slow enough music year, now this!

 

You can read all about it at MR.com on the noticeboard.

 

Our music community is so small...too bad we can't look out for each others backs and thrive.

[Glen]

From what I read it sounds as though Frontiers now think that web advertising is not worth the financial outlay - I guess they feel they can reach their target audience through Facebook / Twitter.

 

In fairness to them this is probably true, although many folk do 'rely' on melodicrock.com for information about new releases & like Andrew's reviews, so this might have an impact.

 

Personally I have so many outlets to gain info/reviews that I doubt it will affect me much, but I agree its a shame about the falling out.

[zacharyamelie]

Target audience through Facebook and Twitter? So his target audience is 25 year old females?

[heavyharmonies]

I can understand both sides of the equation, to a certain extent.

 

Banner advertising revenue has been on the wane for years now, as there are channels to "get the word out" that don't require extensive cash outlay. Unless you are talking about the highest of profile sites that still garner 5- and 6-figure advertising contracts, the arrangements are now along the lines of 2 figures per month.

 

If the bandwidth for the page(s) in question actually are costing Andrew more than he would receive from Frontiers, then Andrew seriously needs to renegotiate his hosting contract. By way of comparison, HH gets between 2,500 and 3,000 unique visitors daily. Not as high traffic as MR, but not insubstantial. My hosting contract comes with 2.5TB (terrabytes!) of bandwidth per month. I use perhaps one quarter of that amount.

 

So either that claim on the cost is inaccurate, or there is something seriously wrong with the contract that Andrew is committed to.

 

That's actually not that uncommon in the hosting business: you sign up with a host for X MB or GB of disk space and Y GB or TB of bandwidth per month (no, there is no such thing as "unlimited" of either, at least at commercial/corporate levels of hosting), and unless you revisit the contract periodically to upgrade the quotas and the hard ware, you can effectively be paying at decade-old hosting rates.

 

I sold banner ad space very early on, but decided to get away from that model, relying on (1) the annual donation drive and (2) the affiliate links on the main site, to foot the bill.

 

Instead, I offer my banner ad space FREE for bands and record labels, and at a very nominal amount for commerical record shops, etc. (nominal as in $50-100 for 6 months).

 

I have, in the past, run into communication issues with people at Frontiers. I think that the language barrier can sometimes be an issue, not to mention the temperment of those fiery Italians.

 

On the other hand, I think that Andrew sometimes overreacts (not a criticism, just an observation).

[Glen]

Target audience through Facebook and Twitter? So his target audience is 25 year old females?

 

I take it you are not on Facebook then?

 

If you care to look at the Frontiers facebook page, you will see it has 38,000 likes (ie 38,000 who follow that page and see anything they post)........that's a lot of 25 yr old females ;-)

 

Also the melodic mafia group is well over 1,000 strong and is all die hard melodic rock fans..........all of which i would bet my nutsack follow the Frontiers page.

 

So yeah I think they have their target audience covered.

[zacharyamelie]

I know many use Facebook, but I can't stand it and abandoned my account about 5 years ago. In my circle of friends it is only used to snoop on others or write useless updates about everyday things.

 

I guess I'll simply have to add a link to Frontiers as one of my favourites from now on to find out what is going on.....or just wait until Stefan posts something here on HH.

 

I still think both MR.com and Frontiers will suffer somewhat from this break-up and no one will be a winner in the end.

 

I don't dislike the music on the MR.com label, but they don't have enough good artists signed to keep me interested. My visits to MR.com will drop without any news of bands signed to Frontiers, whom the majority of the bands I like are signed to.

[Geoff]

Wow, that's quite large news. In all honesty it does not effect me at all, but it seems pretty wild for the biggest label in "our genre" to be completely ignored on the biggest site in "our genre."

 

I read and can definitely understand both point of views, but yeah, just seems wild. It's a hard concept to grasp, that the biggest news source for our genre will be carrying on business basically ignoring the (arguably) biggest releases of each year. What happens if one of Andrew's favourite bands (say Harem Scarem?) release a new album on Frontiers?

[JC_AOR]

Wow, that's quite large news. In all honesty it does not effect me at all, but it seems pretty wild for the biggest label in "our genre" to be completely ignored on the biggest site in "our genre."

 

I read and can definitely understand both point of views, but yeah, just seems wild. It's a hard concept to grasp, that the biggest news source for our genre will be carrying on business basically ignoring the (arguably) biggest releases of each year. What happens if one of Andrew's favourite bands (say Harem Scarem?) release a new album on Frontiers?

Yeah it could get awkward like that. Will this also lead to more biased reviews of their releases on the MR.com website? Or will Andrew not give them the time of day and not review Frontiers releases? I agree it is a strange situation and my guess is it will get resolved soon enough. But personally this does not affect me either.