coming soon: i have that on vinyl website

talking about the passion

I have written briefly here about this, but I wanted to take this opportunity to really introduce you to my website that is launching on Tuesday the 10th.

I Have That On Vinyl (IHTOV) is a pet project born out of passion. I’m not going to write a whole essay about the reason for the site here; that’s my opening column on Tuesday. But I will tell you - and you know this already if you’ve been here a while - the things I am most passionate about in life are music and records. Now I’ve taken that passion and put it into a project that I am giving my all. I want to not only write about the records I love, but I want other people to be able to do that as well. I wanted a place where vinyl/music lovers could go to read about other people’s collections, and possibly contribute something themselves.

I put this idea out on social media in early September. I wanted to gauge what the interest would be, not just in reading such a site, but contributing to it. Turns out the interest was intense. By the end of September I had pitches from 150 people who wanted to write something or being interviewed by me, for absolutely no reason than love of the game. By October it grew to over 200 pitches and in November the essays started coming in hot and heavy. I underestimated how much people want to talk about their collections

I interviewed some of my favorite artists for this, and they agreed to this enthusiastically. They talked eagerly and openly about buying records and their favorite record stores on the road, about making music and recording music, about their passion for music and the records they love and seek the most.

People from all walks of life have written essays about why they collect, about the shops they frequent and specific albums they sought out, about passing their love of records onto their kids, about their childhood vinyl, about how they became collectors. They wrote with love and passion and curiosity, and they were so eager to do so. I got some artists and comedians and writers to do a Q&A about their collections. I can’t wait to share all this with you.

I will admit this has all been a little overwhelming. Gathering the submissions and pitches was a lot of work, and then reading each one as they come in and doing any editing that has to be done, adding pictures and formatting posts - it’s been a little all consuming. But this is a passion project, and I have untold time on my hands as well the eagerness to do this and make it successful. And while I will not have intrusive ads on the site, I will look to get one sponsor so I can pay writers. I’m not looking to make this into a money making machine. It’s a project of love and nothing more.

My sister Lisa has been instrumental in getting my organized by making spreadsheets for me. She has also done all my graphic for the site and her and my other sister Jo-Anne have been great sounding boards. My friend Josh is my web guy, and he has built the site from scratch for me, including a freshly made CMS. I am keeping the site pretty streamlined because I want it to be reminiscent of a blog.

The site will be updated pretty frequently. There will always be on the front page a featured interview, a Q&A, a featured essay, and I will be writing about my vinyl collection one by one, which I will put up a few times a week.

So this is all coming on Tuesday (the mockup above is the actual content going live that morning). I’m excited and nervous as hell. I want this to be a success, of course. And my metric of success is, are people reading it and then coming back to it? Are they telling other people about it? Are they engaging with me on social media about it? If even just dozens of people enjoy it, I will feel like I did something meaningful. This is my post-retirement project and I want it to fill my time from now until forever.

I hope you check in on Tuesday.

If you are interested in pitching, you can read the FAQ and about pitches by going to IHTOV and clicking the links on the bottom.