"Sounds of 2011" is changing

Well, a bit, anyway. I've been thinking about this lately for a variety of reasons, not all of which I want to go into details about. Don't worry, nobody's yelled at me or anything! But I'm not entirely comfortable with how I've been doing the chart countdown up to this point. For one thing, it takes up an awful lot of posts, and this has never really been a music-focused blog.

There's also the fact that the music thing I do most enjoy, the Pony Music Library features, risks being entirely drowned out. On top of that, there's the fact that some people have long since left the fandom and for personal or other reasons deleted their stuff. They may not want it dredged up again. A few smaller things too, but again some of the reasons I'd prefer to keep private.

So, the upshot is that I will no longer be trying to feature every single one of the 2011 Everfree Radio Top 100 songs. I will instead be restricting myself to those that meet at least one of three broad criteria:

1. Tracks that remain available from the artist's own account(s) – whether that be YouTube, Bandcamp, Soundcloud or whatever. If there's an option to buy from the artist's account, I'll continue to link to that.
2. Tracks that are on other accounts, but where there is evidence that the original artist has given permission for this. This might take the form of a note in a video or an artist's own account description.
3. Tracks that are so well known that it would really be pointless leaving them out. This is a slightly more nebulous category, admittedly, but we're talking songs with very large view counts. Think a million, not a thousand.

I've gone back through the posts I've already made and edited out those songs which don't qualify. I very rarely do big retrospective edits like that, but in this case I really would feel more uncomfortable if I didn't. So... see you next time!