Reaching out to Electronic Music community and DJs

Question

There is a lot of great content on music.SE, and I'd love to help grow this site to a self-sustaining level (and help it graduate and get a cool site design!). Several of my previous efforts at reaching out to classical/traditional music communities - including bloggers (there are few of them who are active on a regular basis) and university students - have not generated much interest from current or potential users.

Therefore, I'd like to start reaching out to electronic music communities and DJs; they will have questions that are within the scope of this site (though the mods will likely have to keep an eye on these questions at first to make sure they don't fit better with, say, avp.SE). My job is to attract new users, and right now, it seems like electronic musicians and DJs are a community that has not been fully tapped. Here's my logic in wanting to reach out to them:

• There aren't many questions about computer/electronic music and DJing here, which means we have an opportunity to fill in some holes on our quest to provide a comprehensive collection of canonical answers to questions about musical practice and performance.
• These are users who are already spending a lot of time on the Internet, which is the type of user who helps us generate the best and most content we can.
• I'm not sure that there's any other single source for electronic musicians and DJs to turn to when they have questions. It would be great if music.SE could establish ourselves as that source, which would keep these new users coming back and make them likely to tell their friends.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about this outreach effort; I'm always looking for feedback and will happily reevaluate my plans if the current community thinks this isn't the right direction. After all, you are the ones who built this site.

In addition, know that I will not be ceasing my effort at engaging traditional and classical musicians. For every activity geared toward the electronic community, I will do something targeted towards traditional/classical musicians, too.

Answer 1

I will have a chat with my record label - Alex Tronic records. It is an electronic label (the reason my band is on it is historical, and the fact we are a bit electronic) with DJ's and electronic artists.

It is also well respected in Edinburgh and Scotland as a whole, and the artists on it get a lot of attention.

Answer 2

I really like this idea. Personally I joined this site because I'm playing around with Ableton trying to make music and I have alot of questions. Not all of them are about the program itself, more to do with music theory and questions around how electronic music programs work in general.

I don't have any hard / fast data to back it up, but as far as I know, talking to people who are interested in making electronic music, many of them have little/no experience with music theory, and branching into this area will attract allot of people who have general music questions aswell.

Answer 3

I'm looking at the unanswered questions and they seem to be mainly in the music software and electronic music categories. I think we need to recruit one or more experts in these areas.

Answer 4

It would be great if music.SE could establish ourselves as that source, which would keep these new users coming back and make them likely to tell their friends.

IMO this is a separate and unrelated area, except when it comes to strictly musical questions.

However, I know that technically, this area falls within the parameters outlined for the site. I'm not pleased with that - my interest is in music, not technology and software - but 'it is what it is'. For better or for worse, it appears that the ultimate goal is 'clicks', without which the site would not be sustainable.

See: Questions that are only tangentially related to music itself: