Wednesday 14 March 2007

SL's Back on the WWW

Hello everybody I'm back. DJ SL's London HQ has been off line for probably a few years now (I've honestly lost count). What happened? There were several reasons of which the top one was "I just got bored" and lost interest in what I was doing with the site back then and couldn't think of a new angle. Also I've pretty much given up DJing so there was no promotional value in the site anymore.

For those of you who don't know what it was all about (which is most of you :s) let's glance back. For years and years (since about 1997) this sites primary function was to promote myself as a DJ. My mission statement if you like was to offer unique or pioneering content/services. During the late 90's was a time when underground styles such as UK G were very much still underground and not easily available to the consumer audience. They were only available via specialist record shops or pirate radio. This immediately limited exposure to the UK. This site made available these white label UK Garage tunes for people to listen to (not download) all over the world.

By the summer of 1999 UK Garage was picking up momentum and transformed from the bubbly 4/4 to 2-step via the short lived speedgarage label. It was getting more and more commercial. Artists were starting to get signed by big labels and available in outlets such as HMV. So what did we do find the next thing to do on this site. What was that? it was in the form of streaming content live and direct. Pirate radio had been part of the UK underground music scene for many yrs and used to be the no.1 connection between the up and coming artist/DJ and the consumer. But again pirate radio's reach was limited even to the extent that stations broadcasting from an estate in North London did not reach east or south London let alone the rest of the country. So what did this site do start streaming London pirate radio live over the Internet, worldwide. This was truly bleeding edge at the time. Nobody else was doing it people may have thought of it but nothing more. There were a few Internet only pirate stations such as WeekendRush.co.uk and interFACE (which are still about ) but no FM pirate was available on the Internet certainly not a UK based one. By about 2004 people were generally more familiar with Internet technology and how to exploit it. 2-step was everywhere you went and fast changing into styles called Grimme and Sub-low. The pirates were looking into streaming themselves so I eventually killed the service along with the site.

Its 2007 and over 10yrs since I first published a page on the Internet with the strap line "DJ SL's London HQ" and about time to crank this beast up again. A blog seemed like a good and easy place to start and I aim to talk about topics around music and music technology. So tune in and stay locked........

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