Welcome Melody Trip

I've always believed that more is merrier in media markets. That's why the trends toward one-newspaper towns and radio monopolies are bothersome. The media owners get lazy, the content gets boring, and the audiences are poorly served. Of course, the explosion of diverse content and viewpoints online is an important force in the opposite direction.

It is in that spirit that we welcome a new online media venture to the music festival space. Melody Trip launched earlier this week as a festival-goer community site seeking to cover all genres of music but primarily focused on the indie rock and jamband markets. The site has ambitious plans, mostly unfulfilled for now. It aims to provide a comprehensive festival directory, news, travel services, shopping, contests, and especially community features for festival-goers.

Some of those features may compete with things we're doing with Festival Preview, but we are pleased to see that there's another group of people with the passion and blind faith that it takes to launch a web publishing business focused on the live music market.

To demonstrate our support, Festival Preview has started a satellite blog on the Melody Trip site. We may duplicate some items from here, but will mainly use it as a way to discuss the intersection of the roots music and jamband festival markets. Come by for a visit, and take a tour through Melody Trip's ambitious site.