Actually I didn’t, because I’m not a musician by any measures, and technically it was just a bunch of MP3 files, but still! What I mean is that someone actually bought a record through a referral link at Silent Sound Waves, for the first time.

It was this review of the Right Away, Great Captain! album The Eventually Home that apparantly made someone click the link at the bottom and purchase the album from Amazon, and that is pretty awesome in my book. The way I see it, it means I’ve already reached the goal of the blog, which is to let someone discover new, great music. The obvious next step seems to be to become influential enough to have the ability to kickstart an artists career.

Anyways, I’m couldn’t be more thrilled about the fact that the first referral the site actually made lead to a sale of Right Away, Great Captain!, because Andy Hull is one of my absolute favourites, and I think his work deserves all the attention it can get. The new Manchester Orchestra album is certainly among the top albums I can’t wait for in 2009!

If you’re wondering if this means that SSW is soon to be raking in big dollars, I can give you a firm no on that. This was actually one of the more expensive digital downloads, but it still only resulted in a whopping $.36 to be credited to my Amazon account. I wonder if that’s about as much as Andy Hull made from the sale as well?

Nevertheless, I don’t mind, because I don’t have any big plans to monetize SSW in the foreseeable future. At this point, it’s just fun managing a website again, and on a topic I really enjoy engaging myself in. As the new year comes around, and we get to see how much effort I’m able to actually put into it, we’ll know quickly enough whether or not it will amount to anything more than that at any point.

Just wanted to share that little piece of information with all of you. Now I should really try and get some sleep before I have to go to work in three hours. I accidentally woke up ca. 12 minutes after falling asleep an hour ago. Just three more days of work until the real Christmas break starts though, so I can take it!

Edit: I think I have made the structural changes I want to the theme. It isn’t exactly polished yet, but knowing my own limitations based on lazyness, there’s no telling when it will be. Hope you like it. If not, you can always just subscribe and read it in your reader anyways.

As you can see, I found a theme to base my new theme off of. What you are looking at right now however, is a completely unaltered version of the Blass theme. It’s extremely simple and to the point, and just what I was looking for. I will be modifying it quite a bit however, because I like my blog to have some sense of uniqueness in terms of look, even though it probably doesn’t matter all that much.

Among other things, I want to find a way to display my lifestream on the frontpage as well, but I need to find a plugin that actually works with WordPress 2.7 first. I should have the finished result ready in a couple of days, but don’t expect a drastic departure from what you are looking at right now.

Spent this weekend relaxing and not doing much, except for last night when I went out with a few of my friends, had a few beers (too much) and generally just had a good time. It was a nice celebration of the end of our semester! Yeah, the exams are finally over and done with again, for now.

Because I took the weekend off, I haven’t had time to evaluate the potential new writers over at Silent Sound Waves, but I just briefly reviewed their writings, and it looks like we’ll get at least one new writer on our team. Hopefully I’m as lucky with this time around as I was when I found Matt, because he’s delivered high quality articles that have really helped with gaining attention for the site.

While I am hard at work laying down the groundwork which will hopefully serve as a foundation for the success of my new blog, Silent Sound Waves, which will hopefully launch for real within a few weeks, I thought I’d share some of the things I plan on doing over there.

It’s a music blog, so everything will obviously be centered around music, and more specifically the music that I for some reason feel like writing about. Hopefully I will be able to post on this blog daily (ambitious for me, I know), and I plan on having some specific columns that each will have a new entry once a week:

• Tributes : Articles about artists who have been influential, or just making good music that didn’t influence all that much, for a long time, or is no longer around. This will hopefully give some attention to the music of artists who might have been forgotten.
• “New Artists” : Not really sure what this will actually be called, but the purpose of it is to share new talent, unsigned or just not very recognized, with the readers. Column name suggestions are welcome!

After spending some time on the fence without doing much online except the occasional tweet I went out and just started a new blog, which is called Silent Sound Waves. If the name didn’t reveal it for you, the blog is about music, and this is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while.

The domain was actually registered quite a few months back, but my original plans for it fell through the cracks and I decided to put it off for a while. As you can read more about in the first post, the initial plans for the site were much bigger, but this time around I decided to put the ambitions of world domination away and go for something as simple as a traditional blog.

Summer however is quite a busy time for me, as it is these months of no school I spend working and saving up money for the hard year as a student which is to come. As a result, the next month or so there will just be infrequent and unscheduled new posts at the blog in order to fill it up with content. This is because I believe it is preferable to give the potential readers some idea of what they can expect once I start to promote the blog in the middle of August.

If you are interested in music, mainly in the genres of rock / punk / pop and variations of these, feel free to check out my new blog and subscribe, as I would love some feedback on what I write about, even before I start to seriously promote it. Right now I am for instance working on a monster post of a report from a music festival I attended last weekend, and it will be a good example of what’s to come in the future from me over at Silent Sound Saves, along with news, reviews and a whole bunch of other opinionated posts.

See you there! Or here, if you’re not interested in a bigger dose of me than what you already get here at my personal blog