About Sceneless

CLOSED!

Sceneless is closed for business and we are NO LONGER ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS! Please, save your time, your stuff, and our inboxes! We really appreciate you stopping by, but we won't be doing any more work here.

Contact Info:

All correspondence should be sent to sceneless@gmail.com.

If you would like to send us music to review, e-mail us for a postal address.

Our Intent:

Sceneless is about do-it-yourself music journalism, a zine that is open to contributions from anyone, anywhere.

Sceneless was started by two regular musical cohorts from New Jersey in the United States - Adam Copeland and Billy Gray. Adam and I wanted a good place on the web to read and write about music. The only places on the web where one can read about music are typically sites that don't take contribution immediately (the most popular indie review site doesn't even accept reader letters anymore!). Those that do offer the audience a mode of expression tend to be on the opposite end of the participation spectrum - anybody can write anything, and though they use reader rating systems and things, they tend to be laden with a lot of bad content, and to be pretty outdated (one nice effort that seems to have suffered this fate is HCMagazine).

And thus begat Sceneless. Sceneless is built on the concept of a micro-community. We think that a select group of people with a good focus and sense of camaraderie can do better than the "anything goes" approach, and that we can also do better than the snob approach. Anybody can comment on Sceneless - just signup for a free username, and you can comment. While we may be selective, ANYBODY CAN WRITE FOR SCENELESS!!!! That same username that allows you to comment also allows you to submit articles.

The selective part: to get your writing published on Sceneless you just submit a story into the editing queue. The editors (currently only myself and Adam, but that will expand to our best contributors) read your story, and either send it back to you for further editing, or publish it. Your article will most likely end up on the front page if the editors like it.

People who thoughtfully contribute will be invited to be on the editing team, but for now I want to keep it small. Anybody can write - and the editors have oversight on what gets accepted. We're pretty sure that if you love music, if you are excited about creative, unique, and independent music, that you'll share enough of our tastes to like it here.

Our content: we are interested in music as an art. We want to know who is doing what, we want to know about that amazing band that you saw last night and never heard before, we want to promote independent music in particular (including unsigned groups). We want those writing for us to tell us what they appreciate in what they are covering, why it is worth listening to. We are hoping Sceneless can be a place where you can look to find neat music, because you can find out about junk just about anywhere.

Many of the other websites that cover independent and underground music happen to have a certain loathsome hipster cynicism and snobbery infused in almost all the writing on their site. They are bloated with annoying advertisements that make reading their site difficult/awful. They are often localized - only covering bands in a certain area in an effort to establish a "scene," which usually ends up with a lot of inbred ideas.

There are no hard and fast rules about writing for Sceneless, but I would suggest you refrain from writing a slam-fest on the newest Britney Spears and instead write about something that really interests you, and try to introduce the rest of us to new things, new ideas.

And for the love of God, please, no skits as articles and reviews! (Ed. Only Adam is allowed to do that) There is nothing more annoying than an article painfully reviewing some record as experienced from the perspective of the turd in Frank Zappa's Toilet.

Please have a look around, and feel free to contribute. Welcome to our experiment in citizen journalism for music!

Sincerely,
Billy Gray, Editor