Our home baked music site PhilMusic.com has gone through several stages of evolution in its 15 or so years of existence.
It started as a mailing list (then referred to as a “listserv”) on the local ISP iPhil in 1996 before becoming a full-fledged web domain. It then went through another round of evolution as a website, from an online music magazine (actually more like a music blog in today’s sense, before the word “blog” was even invented) from 1996 to 2004 — to today’s musician-oriented community forum.
As a new media destination site for the band-dominated music scene of the the era, PhilMusic pioneered some things taken for granted today – the music artist chat event, an event calendar known as a “gig guide”, online concert photography galleries, the site podcast, and long articles and reviews that would probably have looked great in print but were dedicated to the online medium.
Since 2005, today’s PhilMusic.com Forum (talk.philmusic.com) is more familiar to local musicians as the defacto place to find great deals in music gear. Looking to sell your guitar or want to swap stories about the best effects boxes with fellow guitarists? The PhilMusic Forum is the place.
This community identity may not be ideal for people who still miss the old music-journalism persona of the site, but in today’s net scene, every band already has their own site or social media account plugging their own gigs, and publishing their own content and photos. Having a third party join in would just add to the new media clutter. Besides, every local band out there already has its own Facebook page, and probably a Twitter account as well.
Speaking of Facebook, as of Feb 2011, you can now add another stage of evolution: PhilMusic the Facebook Page. Rather belatedly, The PhilMusic Facebook Page went up in Feb 2011 to serve as the official online presence of the site on Facebook. You can find the page through the URL http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom .
Facebook Pages makes perfect sense for all sorts of corporations and media companies nowadays.The amount of people you can reach on it is staggering (22M Filipinos at last count), and the engagement is amazing.
Content posted on Facebook gets more hits than if they were just placed online on a stand alone website. Then there’s that whole social notion of “Liking” and sharing content, which drives eyeballs back to the original content sources better than the old darling of the blogging community – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – ever could. And since there’s no cost to hosting on Facebook – the combination is irresistible.
What to put in a Facebook edition of PhilMusic? After stumbling on a couple of old drives filled with old PhilMusic content – made up of photos, videos and features articles from the site’s “online magazine era”, some of which had been previously published online, some of which had never been seen by the public – I decided to sift through these old files and repost some of these on the Facebook page. People can then freely share these with their contacts.
So there’s the page’s reason for existence: A place to highlight material from PhilMusic’s archives.
A visit to the PhilMusic Facebook page today is a bit like a trip through a time machine. You’ll see images from a performance that took place in 2005, or read a review of a “new” artist that was originally published in 1999. But you’ll see this through the eyes of a modern Facebook user, using the online photo and video display and “like”, commenting, and sharing social functions of today.
So come join us and sift through bits and pieces of music history of the recent past. With 15 years of local music-oriented content to go through, you’re sure to bump into some gems.
The new-fangled social media touchpoints… “Like” or “Follow” PhilMusic on these links!
PhilMusic on Facebook: http://facebook.com/philmusic.dotcom
PhilMusic on Twitter: http://twitter.com/philmusic
The Ayson Chronicles 
Philmusic was directly resposible for me finding the rest of my band memebers. And for that, I will be forever greatful! Thanks sir Jim!