You probably noticed an update to Sound on the Sound’s look in the past week. Over the last year we’ve been trying to figure out a way to better tap into and present the now six years of content contained on these pages. At our inception we were a blog, featureless and stream of conciousness; everything was new. Now that we’ve had a chance to do some scoping of the Northwest music scene, we wanted to make that collected knowledge a bit more conducive to someone else diving through and discovering quality music as we have.

More than a simple blog, Sound on the Sound version 4 is now intended to help folks wade through the various entities involved in the scene as we’ve reported on them, artists, venues, labels, and the like a little better by collecting things in profile pages and more formally cataloging them. This new information system is a work in-progress and will probably will always be. Right now the vast majority of those profile pages are still to be created, but you can check out a few completed examples in The Head and the Heart and Pickwick. Venue, event and other entity pages will have similarly relevant past and current information drawn from our daily content populating their profiles (see the colored tags at the left for those various entities as they are associated with a post).

As you might’ve already seen, other changes include updating how we present photos in our posts. We’ve revamped the calendar and given it a dedicated page. Our growing list of video productions deserved a dedicated page, and so did a greatest hits photos collection. The most difficult piece to implement the way we wanted was the mp3 player widget and jukebox page functionality. Not all the music featured on SOTS is uploaded or available in a freely downloadable form, so not music featured will appear in this mp3 page. But anywhere we do provide a stream in our own player on the site, the mp3 will appear in that mp3 page for a period of time. I’ve always wanted to have a sort of digital jukebox with the latest content that appeared on Sound on the Sound available in this format, and we’ve finally got it.

Feel free to poke around, but again, please note the various profile pages are mostly not created just yet and will be in due time. Lot’s of metadata manipulation has yet to be done to populate these pages, a process that I hope to complete in the coming month or two.

A huge debt of thanks goes to Josh’s brother Andrew Lovseth who is largely responsible for making the new site look so good and working through most of the hard parts of implementing the functionality we wanted entirely with WordPress.

And while we’re sharing meta news, we’d like to take the opportunity to welcome local photographer Lori Paulson to our staff. We’ve admired Lori’s work for KEXP and on buddy blog Another Rainy Saturday for years and she’ll start sharing her beautiful photographs with us this September. We love Lori’s passion and perspective and how her photos highlight the tiniest details even when shooting the big picture and we’re very lucky to have her joining us. Welcome, Lori!