For the past year or so, I’ve been posting a new Mixcloud mix EVERY Monday AND Thursday, but after hitting episode 200 of The Mix Tape Radio Show last Thursday, I figured it was time to re-evaluate my mix making/posting schedule.

You see, one of the biggest challenges of running an independent one-person music blog is that you have to try and find the balance of putting in enough time/effort so that you’re pumping out enough subjectively consistent quality content that it would be worth someone else’s attention if they were to happen to decide to start following what you do, while at the same time you have to be mindful about not putting in way more time/effort than makes sense for something that earns no real money and doesn’t actually capture the attention of enough people who want to follow what you’re doing on a regular basis, even for free. Let’s be honest, most people are not looking for any new sources for any more stuff that they don’t have any time for anyways.

Thankfully, I’ve been blahging for long enough to have already worked past all those “what is even the point?!” frustrations that kill off most blogs in their first 3 to 7 years—fwiw I am well into my “the only way to change the world is for us to all stop trying to be successful within the current system” stage of thinking anyways, so continuing to have an unsuccessful blog fits that outlook quite perfectly—but that doesn’t mean that I still don’t have to be careful with how & where I am expending my finite time/effort (for example, I have another blog that also doesn’t earn any money that I need to think about). And as much as I enjoy putting together my Mixcloud mixes, I have to be realistic about whether the lack of demand for other people wanting to listen to them matches the time & effort demand required to keep putting together new ones every 3/4 days.

So, with the long-running The Mix Tape Radio Show hitting a solid total number of episodes of 200, it just feels like a good time to hit the pause button on the manufacturing of that series and scale things down to just continuing the two bi-weekly mix series I started over the last year, The Mix Tape Radio Mix CDs and The HI54 Yearbook Mixes—which I was posting on Mondays, but I will now switch to posting those on Thursdays.

I might bring back The Mix Tape Radio Show’s “Shuffle Up’d 8” format at some point (because I do like that format + 200 isn’t really the perfect number to stop at), but for now I just want to see how different my weeks/months will feel by removing one of my weekly recurring tasks from the never-ending ‘To Do’ list. Especially with everything else going on in life, it just feels like I could do with freeing up some of my headspace to focus more on some other things besides the sharing of music in ways that a majority of people don’t really respond to.

That being said, you’ll still be able to listen to HI54 mixes over on Mixcloud or over on MTR (which also exists over on the mountain town site I run, although the mountown locals seem extra not interested in any of the music stuff I do), with new mixes still dropping on an EVERY Thursday basis, so for most people besides me, I don’t think much has changed or will be all that noticeable (which is kinda the main point of making the change).

So why don’t you wash down all these thinking-out-loud words by pressing play on the MTR - FRESH TAPES player below, which’ll continue to play one mixtape after the other ALL DAY if/whenever you want it to…

…and I will continue to see you out on the internets \m/

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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI