Six years ago today we published a post called “Hidden Track: And So It Begins…” that introduced a new site to the blogosphere and 9,467 posts later we’re finally starting to hit our stride. This past year has been our best yet in so many ways thanks to the relentless work of our team of contributors. It’s been our goal since day one that, despite all of us having day jobs, we keep the site as fresh as possible. And that doesn’t just mean keeping the flow of posts coming, we try our best to come up with stories and link to content that you don’t see everywhere else. Hopefully we’ve succeeded.

[© Stuart Miles | Dreamstime.com]

It’s been an incredible ride over the last 2,000+ days and we’re so thankful to our readers for continuing to visit. We take an enormous sense of pride in the fact that nearly 50% of our traffic comes from repeat visitors, an unusually high number in the music blog game. We hope that trend continues.

Thanks to all of our contributors who put in tons of work both through posts and “behind-the-screen.” We all do this because we’re passionate about sharing the music we love. Please bear in mind that Comments, Facebook “likes” and tweets help motivate us and are appreciated more than you can imagine. Be sure to follow our Twitter feed and “like” our Facebook page where we don’t just share the work we do, but also point you towards articles on other sites we think our readers will enjoy. As always, if you have any suggestions on how to make HT better, don’t hesitate to contact us.

As we wrap up our celebration of five years of Hidden Track, we wanted to take a look back and reflect on the various trends across the music landscape since we’ve been in existence. Clearly, there have been some seismic shifts in the business of music including the demise of record sales, a complete overhaul of the avenues for distribution, and the rise of the internet as a means for breaking new acts, but this column will focus more on the actual music and the fans who consume it.

[Graphic by Elaine Fogel]

Jamband Fans Have Segregated – We talk a lot around here about the late nineties and the good heyday of the jamband, and that is not meant to be a self-congratulatory proclamation, but the fact is the jamband scene was significantly different. The community element was much more prominent. If somebody liked jambands, they pretty much liked all jambands. If Widespread Panic came to town, you went to see them. If String Cheese Incident came to town, you went to see them. Shit, if Ekoostik Hookah came to town, you went to see them too. It was always the same people at the same shows with a common interest: improvisation. Nowadays, for better or worse, it’s a totally divisive beast. Of the people who still actively listen to jamband music today, it seems the vast majority listen only to Phish, and virtually nobody seeks out truly new jamband acts.

READ ON

In honor of Hidden Track’s fifth anniversary we’re setting our geekery scope on ourselves instead of Phish or Wilco for the latest installment of our The Number Line column. While we knew we’ve churned out a good deal of content since October ’06, some of these numbers surprised us.

Unfortunately we don’t have stats from our first year of existence, so most of these figures are from the end of 2007 onwards. Thanks for reading and for picking up what we’ve been laying down.

• 8,000,000 = Approximate # of Articles Read (10/06 – 10/11)
• 6,000,000 = Approximate # of Visitors (10/06 – 10/11)
• 1,232,283 = Times Front Page Loaded (12/07 – 10/18/11)
• 1,151,912 = Visitors to HT from Google
• 322,062 = Visitors to HT from Phantasy Tour
• 195,457 = Visitors to HT from Facebook
• 36,839 = Total Comments Left
• 22,386 = Times “Phish Festival: Save The Date” Article Viewed
• 19,846 = Most Visitors In One Day (2/22/11)

“It’s our blog. Down here. Our blog. Chester Copperpot.”

On a overcast Monday morning in NYC five years ago today, Slade Sohmer published a post titled “And So It Begins” that introduced a feisty blog called Hidden Track to the world. Our aim was to bridge worlds that at the time we started weren’t connected–the worlds of indie, jam and classic rock–and while there are many websites that focus on those genres now, it wasn’t that way in ‘06.

[Old (Below) & New (Above)]

Over the past five years we’ve published more than 7,500 posts written by approximately 100 contributors that have been read by over six million visitors from across the globe. We took home a Weblog Award for the best music blog, were honored as best music blog by WNEW and have had our work linked to by the biggest publications on the web.

Now don’t get us wrong, the past five years haven’t come easy. Our contributors and staff ALL have day jobs and it’s our passion for music that drives us day in and day out. We’ve seen a number of music-related websites come and go (and come and go again in some cases) during our time and have always placed importance on consistency. Our readers rely on us for fresh content and we take pride that you can come to Hidden Track every two hours on a work day between 9AM and 5PM to find something new. But enough about the past, let’s talk about the future.

READ ON

We wanted to remind everybody that we’ll be celebrating Hidden Track’s fifth anniversary this Friday night, October 14th, at the Village Lantern in NYC. Our pals D.O.T.S. C.O.N.F.U.S.E. M.I.N.D.S., Will McCranie’s WM3 trio and The Whitewalls are all slated to perform.

For a taste of each of these bands, be sure to check out our first post on Friday’s festivities. Hope to see you there!

Late in the evening on October 16, Hidden Track will hit the five year mark. We’ve got plenty in store that week, but we wanted to invite our readers to join us in celebrating the anniversary at NYC’s Village Lantern on October 14. Three bands will be on the bill with ties to our site – HT contributing editor Ryan Dembinsky’s D.O.T.S. C.O.N.F.U.S.E. M.I.N.D.S., contributor Will McCranie’s WM3 trio and HT faves The Whitewalls.

We wanted to share  a track from each group to give you a taste of what you can expect at the Village Lantern on the 14th.

David Lott of The Whitewalls has spent the last few months working on some solo tracks, with a formidable lineup of musicians that includes Rob Heath (drums, Justin Townes Earle, Steve Earle), Tim Luntzel (bass, Roseanne Cash, Bright Eyes, Norah Jones) and Riley McMahon (recording engineer, keys, lap steel, New Warsaw Studio). Check out one of the fruits of Lott’s labor – Paint By Numbers…

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Next up, we’ve got Never Again and Dance.Dance.Dance. from the Will McCranie (WM3), which shows off a much harder, rockin’ side of Will’s songwriting than some of the solo stuff he was coming out with towards the beginning of his career…

Finally, take a listen to the super catchy Jenn You Whine from D.O.T.S.:

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The action starts at 10PM next Friday, October 14, at the Village Lantern on Bleecker between Sullivan and Thompson. We hope to see you there!

The web is growing increasingly mobile and it’s time Hidden Track caught up. On the heels of officially launching our official Twitter feed, we have now optimized our site for a superior reading experience for anyone viewing Hidden Track on a smartphone. A quick look at our traffic analytics shows us that in March of 2010, 4% of our traffic came from mobile devices. That number is up by a multiple of three as 12% of our traffic came from mobile devices in March of this year.

We are using a great plugin for WordPress called WPtouch Pro. For bloggers out there using WordPress, we highly recommend both the free version, WPtouch, and also think it is absolutely worth the $39 to buy the Pro version of this package that we found out-of-the-box very easy to configure.

Now that we’ve got a mobile interface up and running, we hope you are now more likely to check in on the latest Hidden Track stories on your mobile device while you’re commuting, at a bar, waiting for the band to go on at your next show or wherever you may be. There is no URL to bookmark, just navigate to Hidden Track or any article from your smartphone or tablet and the page will automatically render in a format suitable for your device.

And here is where we need your help. We can’t decide how to display the mobile version of our homepage. We laid out the two options and in true Hidden Track fashion we’re letting our readers decide which one to go with.

READ ON for the two options and to vote…

It’s here. At long last we launched Hidden Track’s very own Twitter account, cleverly named @Hidden_Track so now we can share our thoughts, links and pics with you, all in bursts of 140 characters or less. If you’re a veteran tweeter, someone who tweets occasionally or if you’re looking to get into the game – start following @Hidden_Track, we’ve got great things planned.

Followers can expect more than just links to Hidden Track stories (though they’ll be a few of those) as we’ll also be live tweeting at shows, holding Q&As with our followers, running polls, hosting contests, retweeting and letting you know what’s on the staff’s playlists.

We want to engage and interact with our followers for input on stories and the columns you regularly see on Hidden Track. Maybe one week our followers will tweet song suggestions for Cover Wars, or offer their favorite versions of a song for competition.  The next B List could be your tweeted idea.

That’s only a taste of what we’ve got planned.  Our first contest drops later today so click that follow button and tweet (and retweet) your friends about @hidden_track.

Today, we’re going to continue a segment started in 2006 called the Four Questions. If you’re a long-time Hidden Track reader who has never commented before, we hope that you’ll participate in this thread.

Sure it ain’t Passover, but we’ve got four questions for you anyway…

1. What was your single favorite musical experience of 2010?

2. What band are you most excited to see in 2011?

3. What under-the-radar band didn’t get nearly enough buzz this year?

4. While everyone focuses on the “best of” this time of year, we want to know, what was the worst live musical performance you caught in 2010?

Leave your answers as comments below…

As hard as this is for us to believe, today marks the fourth anniversary of Hidden Track’s launch. When Slade Sohmer and I started this site on October 15th, 2006, we aimed to get two or three posts up per week. Pretty quickly we developed a daily schedule of posts and now we average about six posts per weekday. In fact, this post is our 5,892nd post of all-time. Not bad for a team of part-timers who do this for our love of the music.

With each passing year our readership continues to grow and 2010 looks to be our best year for traffic by a longshot. More importantly, it’s been our best year for content as we continue to launch new columns and improve upon old ones. This website would never succeed without the hard work of  our contributors and I’m not just talking about the posts you read on the site – there’s plenty of work by our whole team that goes on behind the scenes.

I’d like to thank our readers first and foremost, but I’d also like to thank Jeff Greenblatt, DaveO, Ryan Dembinsky, Wade Wilby, Jeremy Gordon, Carla Danca, Chad Berndtson, Luke Sacks, Randy Ray, Jon Hochstat, Dan Alford, Jonathan Kosakow and Adam Kaufman as well as the Glide Magazine team for their hard work and support over these last four years.

• Hidden Track: Twitter Account, RSS Feed, Facebook Page

We hope you’ve been picking up what we’ve been laying down and will continue to do so in the future. Comments, Facebook “likes” and tweets help motivate us and are always appreciated. We’re also always open to suggestions and submissions. See our About Us page for more information on contacting us. Here’s hoping we have at least four more years in the tank.

Believe it or not today marks three years for Hidden Track. Back on October 16, 2006, Ace Cowboy kicked off the HT era by answering a batch of frequently asked questions. Three years, 4,065 posts and 79 contributors later we’re finally approaching the “full roiling boil” Ace predicted that day.

From that first day forward we aimed to provide our readers with intelligent, interesting and witty articles from a wide variety of voices about not only the latest and greatest rock, indie and jam bands, but also some of our favorite acts from the past like these guys. Hopefully we’ve succeeded.

I just want to take a minute to thank DaveO and Jeff for all of the time and effort they put into both the front end and the back end of the site. We all put in busy days at our 9-5 and these guys are always there for the phone calls and IM conversations that help shape the direction of Hidden Track. I also want to thank all of the other contributors, the Glide guys, our readers and anyone who has ever left a comment – we love comments.

We’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeves, because…

Well…time for more popcorn, Red Vines, Raisinettes, and a refill of that 97-ounce soda. We take a break from our regular look at obscure films with another edition of Intermission, which means another look at a cinematic chestnut that may have been lauded or groundbreaking in the past, but has since been forgotten in history’s hourglass.

The art of making films does not always require human characters. We have seen the future, and life forms come in all different shapes, all manners of tricky invention spun and tweaked through months of computer-generated exotica into various tales—action/adventure, science fiction, fantasy, and the deluge of superhero-centric films. This week’s Hidden Flick was the first feature-length animated film, a unique gem of meticulously crafted silhouettes, and we tip our hat to The Adventures of Prince Achmed.

The tale comes from a classic, time-honored source—excerpts from The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou, found within 1001 Arabian Nights, and featured in Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book. Prince Achmed, Aladdin, a flying horse and the Witch of the Fiery Mountain face-off with a formidable foe, an evil African sorcerer, in order to win the heart of Princess Peri Banu who comes from an island filled with magic.

READ ON for more of this week’s Hidden Flick…

Nominations are currently underway for the 2008 Weblog Awards and your old pals at Hidden Track are up for this year’s Best Music Blog prize. If you like what we do here, please take a few seconds to vote for us. Simply head to this page and scroll down to the comments beneath the post. We’re the first nominee in the comments section. Click the green button with the plus symbol in the middle next to our name to support Hidden Track.

Okay, enough about us. Let’s see what’s happening today…

• Rush’s new DVD offers a look at their musical interplay
• Neil Young’s advice on saving the big car companies
• Andy Gadiel asked his followers to share concert words
• Check out this really cool behind the scenes look at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Music Masters program in Cleveland
• Producer Daniel Lanois talks about the new U2 album
• Stream Paul McCartney and Youth’s new Fireman album

Finally, one of my all-time faves – Neil Finn – has put together quite the supergroup for the latest Seven Worlds Collide album. Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, John Stirrat, Glenn Kotche and Pat Sansone, Smiths/Modest Mouse guitarist Johnny Marr, Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg, singer/songwriter Lisa Germano and his son Liam all join Neil for the new album and run of shows in New Zealand this January.

Well, I’ve got a big problem. It’s my turn to write an introduction to my favorite piece and to say thank you, but if I wanted to thank all of the people who helped make Hidden Track the 1,892 most read blog in New York City it would take up the whole front page of the site. I guess I could try to limit it and just say thanks to some. Yet, I’d feel awful not thanking each person who has written a post, gave us a tip, offered encouragement, shot photos, commented on a post, added HT’s feed to their RSS reader, gave us advice or made us better in some way, shape or form.

Yet I need to thank you – the reader. We’ve come so far in the last 24 months, and I still get a huge smile each time someone leaves a comment and responds to what we’re putting out there. Ace taught me so much and I’ll be eternally grateful to him for starting this site, bringing me aboard and putting together an amazing team. Most of all, he set an incredibly high standard as an editor and writer and made me realize that each post counts. Ace made sure to teach me about journalistic standards, because the reputation of this blog – and us as writers – depended on it. While I still struggle with grammar, I’ll never stop trying to keep this rag’s reputation as good as it was the day he left.

So, I wound up thanking quite a few people after all. Let me also thank Dave, Rupert and Some Dude – a guy who I seriously couldn’t do this without – for helping to establish HT’s current tone and contributing incredible posts each week. Thanks to the Glide guys for all of their unwavering help, support and of course deciding to start this blog. Thanks to the folks on PT, The Bort and Team HLA for linking, reading and lending a hand. I literally have a list of about 75 other people to thank, but I think I’ll just send them a note to spare y’all for any more self-serving ridiculousness.

So without further ado, it’s time for my favorite piece. This anniversary has made me extremely nostalgic and I can’t stop thinking about the beginning. The first good piece I ever wrote, and the day I knew I had a shot at this thing was a post about a band made up of 16 year old Umphrey’s fans, Tribute to Whigg.

READ ON to take a look at The Royal Tennenbrah’s Saga Continues…

As legend has it, I was the guy behind the guy that got this daily music site on its feet, and was also a huge fan from day one. When Ace decided to step down earlier this year, I got the call up to the big leagues after toiling over my own indie-jam blog for something like two and a half years to share daily writing duties with Scotty and have enjoyed every minute of bringing my writing style and my music tastes to a much broader audience.

Over my eight-plus months, I’ve tried to introduce you guys to some music that bridges the gap between jam and indie without using the dreaded P word with Better Than Noodling. Since not everyone obsesses over reading blogs to find new music, this has been my place to showcase some bands that I really dig that may not be as obvious, but I think you should be listening to. When I initially wrote this piece on Vampire Weekend I had a hunch they were primed for a big year, but little did I know that the band would explode the way did going from playing the Bowery Ballroom to three sold out shows at the cavernous Terminal 5 in less than a year’s time. It certainly feels good to get it right, but it was more about the fact that I couldn’t get enough of them.

Before we get to it just wanted to thank Ace for letting me get my feet wet over here and digging my initial idea behind BtN and to Scotty who is the hardest working man in show business and unbelievably supportive, thanks gents for bringing me on. This is truly a labor of love, so we hope you enjoy reading HT as much as we enjoy writing it…

READ ON for Better Than Noodling – Vampire Weekend…