Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all OffBeat and Weekly Beat readers. It’s just a few days before Christmas and I’d like to take this quiet time to thank all of our loyal readers and supportive advertisers and sponsors for continuing to see the value of and to support what we do.

We thank you most gratefully and promise to continue to cherish and promote local music and culture faithfully throughout the upcoming years.

We have not abandoned print, by any means. Throughout the upcoming year, we will publish OffBeat in print format on a limited basis (for sure, with the Jazz Fest Bible™). All media—print, music, film, amongst others—has been turned on its head as a result of the prevalence of the internet and social media over the past 10 years, and the COVID shutdown just exacerbated these issues vis a vis music, both live and recorded.

To wit: I’ve been alive long enough to experience land-based radio, AM, then FM and now high def and streaming; 45s, 33 1/3s, CDs, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, DVDs, and now streaming music and video services. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s not just the media that’s being used: it’s also the change in the methods that recorded music is delivered and distributed to its audience.

Music consumers find and acquire their music totally differently now. We rely more on streaming via YouTube and Spotify to find new artists we love.It’s more expensive to enjoy music. It’s also more difficult to get exposed to the hundreds of thousands of artists who create music because there’s just so much of it (unfortunately, a lot of it is not my cuppa, but that’s nothing new to any of us).

The “filters” that used to be provided by those old-fashioned “record labels” are mostly gone. The filters are now playlists.

Most music freaks under 50 don’t collect CDs anymore (CDs being an “ancient” form of music distribution). It’s so hilarious to me that the newest music media of choice has revolved (no pun intended) back to vinyl, which is so much more expensive to produce than CDs for both the music creators and music purchasers.

It cracks me up to hear people tell me that the sound of CDs sounds so “cold” compared to vinyl. Why, yes it may be, but the vast majority of people’s ears really can’t tell the difference. Marketing vinyl to music consumers (and musicians) is trendy and way more lucrative than selling CDs. Vinyl may sound marginally better but makes it hard as hell for musicians to cart around boxes of promotional or for-sale LPs when they are on tour, but then you need to. CDs are out of trend and players are expensive as hell, or even non-existent. It’s also too bad that there’s a vinyl “shortage” that makes record album production extremely slow and even more expensive.

What’s next? Cassette tapes? Not kidding. I hear that the record store in some airports are resorting to cassettes because they are still cheap and easy to reproduce. Yep, what goes around comes around.

Does that mean we will see a resurgence of print media? Well, hopefully, but at this stage of the lifecycle of OffBeat, we’re not betting on it.

So OffBeat.com will remain our primary source of music journalism and editorial, along with the Weekly Beat newsletter) and social media (also digital).

We have a lot of plans in the work for OffBeat.com content, and of course will keep all informed about changes in digital and/or print.

We appreciate your support and readership so much!

This time of year is also appropriate to thank our extremely hard-working staff: Joseph Irrera, Noé Cugny and Dalton Spangler, and all of our writers, photographers, content creators, our interns and volunteers. It takes a lot of really hard work to put out OffBeat every month and the Weekly Beat every week—digitally and otherwise.

Thank you so much for keeping OffBeat around for 34+ plus years.