Brony Musician Directory

The Brony Musician Directory is a site credted by Freewave and designed to work as a directory for the brony musician community. It is composed of musician profiles, complete with brief biographies and featured tracks, for all known brony musicians. It is also designed as a hub for other brony music sites featuring categories and links to events, forums, news sites, and radio stations. It has a genre section which allows people to see highlights of brony music in well known genres and links to pull up artists who specialize in those genres.  

OriginsEdit

The Brony Musician Directory was initially created based on the My Little Remix Known Brony Musician List. After updating and expanding the initial list, Freewave launched BMD on blogspot on April 12, 2012 and began creating artist profiles in more depth, writing each artist's profile personally. Glitchhog and Legion were the first staff to join in the project, at which point the site began to grow at a steadier pace. As the site and the music community grew, however, it became less practical to create profiles from scratch, and BMD developed an artist queue with a form to fill out so the information could be provided by the artists themselves. BMD continues to contact new artists directly to fill out submission data. Artists are encouraged to request updates to keep their profiles current with recent music and any necessary changes. Artists are displayed alphabetically on the left side of the site (including aliases that redirect to the artist's profile). The newest profiles continue to display on the main page due to the blog format.

Overhaul

As BMD grew, its staff decided to redesign both the site's layout and its function. It created particular pages dedicated to events, forums, news sites, and radio stations and began to organize monthly Youtube playlists for EqD-featured tracks for each month, best tracks of the year, and eventually a top musicians of the community list based on Youtube subscription totals. New staff, including LFP, Emperor Übermensch, Matthew N, LoreRD, and Magnitude Zero, were added over several months to replace previous members.

Interviews

BMD has conducted two official interviews via Skype, which were later made into Youtube videos. The first was with Eurobeat Brony, who spent much of the time discussing the origins of brony music and his production methods. The second was with Stars in Autumn, but it failed to generate as much interest and led to the eventual termination of the interview series.

Second Chances

BMD organized an event album known as Second Chances, intended to offer a new opportunity to underappreciated tracks that had been passed over by EqD. Those who entered had a chance to listen and pick their favorites, eventually made it onto the Bandcamp album. It was met with several months of delays before being posted on EqD, at which point Sethisto had already instituted the Music of the Day system, rendering a second album in the series moot.

Genre System

The genre system was created to make it easier for fans to find artists in particular genres. It defines a genre, highlights a set of key tracks, and includes a specialized search function for artists within the genre. The main genre page lists all major genres produced by the community. Each genre has an mlp character chosen that best represents that genre's personality.

Criticism

While profiles were designed to be updated over time so that musicians could keep their featured music and descriptions current, few have actually attempted to do so. Some well-known musicians have never taken part in creating or updating profiles so their profiles tend to remain outdated. BMD is also not well-known throughout the community and as such receives less traffic in comparison to other outlets such as EqD. Since profile entries and updates are done at the request of an artist, they are not immediate. Those artists who have not updated their profiles with descriptions of genres they specialize in will not be displayed in search results for those genres.

References