I do miss the threads on AP where band members would pop in for a couple hours to chat/ do Q&A. Also Thomas Nassiff's review of Young New England. Apart from those things, not really.
Lmao I had forgotten about Q&A chat band threads. Those were always fun and often messy. That Keith Buckley post brought back a memory to me: Wasn't there a weekly date / relationship column or did I make that up? Something about Hamlet or perhaps I'm mistaking that for a thread in the old Personal Life subforum.
Agreed 100 %. I'm sorry for the users that invest a lot of time making these, but that's also why I don't get the point of Brackets, even if I participated in a few of them at first. Is this what music discussion has been reduced to? Not to feel like I'm advertising (once again) the other place I've migrated to these last few years. But on Popjustice, there's a subforum called Rates, where people decide to celebrate an artist's discography or some of it (there are also themed ones with multiple acts FYI), by individually rating all the songs, and potentially writing commentary next to the scores. Yes, I know we all hate scores due to ap.net reviews but let me finish. People are allowed to do write-ups about albums, or certain eras, specific memories or concerts. I mean, some of that happens on music threads on here, but it's different. When the voting deadline is reached, the host then reveals the results over a certain period of time. Honestly... having had the same feeling described in your first paragraph before, participating in these has made me regain my love for music discussions. It made me put the effort into expanding my vocabulary, as English isn't my native language and I tend to use the same words and expressions over and over again, to pay attention to the songs themselves and to think critically. It also makes users get to know each others in some way. Plus, users are dragging each others playfully as banter is welcome! Unlike brackets, where reading the results just feels like you're doing math or stats homework... who even remembers them? I don't know how to word any of that without sounding rude, so again, I'm not trying to come at any of the Bracket users. I just wish the aforementioned feature would be implemented or tried on here. It's not like we're lacking on bands with extensive discographies. Just imagine a Jimmy Eat World, Paramore, Every Time I Die, etc. rate. Or themed ones like Twinkly Emo bands, or Drive-Thru Records era, or Early 00's pop-punk... just some ideas on the top off my head. The main drawback would be the time required to organize one if anyone wants to host one of those, but it doesn't have to be done all alone. I'd be up for certain bands, that I'm sure. Perhaps I should be the change I want to see, because I sound like a hypocrite right now lol. Just an example on how it's done, here's one I was a part of a few months back. Or if you want to have a meltdown about results, here's how pop music fans can view Paramore.
Brackets were fun in the beginning when there were like, a few for big legacy bands - but once they started rolling out and clogging the feed with artists who have like 2 albums total it felt silly.
It also feels hard for me to blame ‘Chorus’ as a whole though for the monotonous rankings behaviors though, because thats solely a product of it’s users. Chorus doesn’t promote that behavior or claim to be a music rankings website, so i can’t compare it to AP in that regard because it seems unfair. Just, like, stop ranking things lol
I miss being able to go through all of the old reviews/news posts. I accidentally found the site my junior year of high school the day that Issues dropped their first single so it was cool searching up old posts of single drops/reviews of albums from the 2000s to see how people reacted at the time. Plus someone did a Brokencyde review where they gave the album a .8/10 or something like that, went back to that weekly. The news section of AP in general was more in sync with my musical tastes at the time compared to Chorus as well, now I've migrated to r/poppunkers or r/emo for news on a lot of those kind of bands. Forums are less toxic now though. The only post I ever made was around 2013 asking what happened to Cute is What We Aim For. The comments were so malicious on that post that I never posted on the account again. Overall I like Chorus better just because of the atmosphere, but got to thank AP for showing me The Wonder Years.
I do not miss some of the comments on the news posts on AP. Forums feel fairly similar in the few I frequent
I would also get my teeth kicked in on a semi-regular basis on AP, (not for backwards-ass views but for musical preference differences) so I def do not miss that EDIT: I do miss the warped predictions thread but obviously that's not Chorus' fault lol. I would check that religiously in high school and give the "scoops" I found to my friends and they thought I had some industry connections or something lol
Yeah but part of it is nostalgia and part of it is just specific people who no longer post here (or nowhere near as much). I didn’t join there until 2010 so it’s bizarre to think that I’ve now been using Chorus longer
Yes there was a kind of Old Internet vibe on AP that isn’t prevalent here. Way more chaotic and mean but also more engaging bc it felt like everyone cared more? Like people in this very thread are talking nostalgically about specific events or users from AP, and I can think of tons of stuff that hasn’t been mentioned. But I don’t really have those kinds of memories about anything on Chorus
I have a lot of memories about AP.net, some fond and some not so much. I was in high school when I was most active on the forums (probably between 2010-2012), and I don’t miss the mean comments I sometimes received. But I found most of the music I still listen to today through the forums, so for that I’m thankful. I haven’t been as active a poster on chorus.fm but I attribute that more to not being as much of an active listener of music the past few years than to anything else. I actually prefer this website in pretty much every way. I’ve tried to get back into discovering more new music the past month or two, and I’ve actually found the level of music discussion here to be pretty awesome!
Can’t say that I truly miss AP. Found it in 2013 when I was 17 and obsessed with bands that make me recoil now because of horrendous abuse. I also didn’t like myself and was so shy, I felt like some people there would’ve torn me apart. So, I didn’t join the forums. However, I do wish I could read some of the old reviews and interviews. When I stumbled across Chorus, though, I decided to have a fresh start and try to engage in an online community that wasn’t tumblr. I’m very thankful for this place and the opportunities it has given me. I’ve learned from so many incredible people, made friends and found music that means the world to me. To be honest, I never enjoyed much pop-punk, so the artists I find here appeal to my music taste way more.
can i help you do some math buddy chorus was 2016 anyway i joined 2011 but by the time chorus came up i was only checking a few threads so it wasnt that much different. what i miss is really just aspects of forum culture that have died on the internet at large more than anything specific about AP. remember when you would get in a forum argument and you would both post like 8 paragraphs at a time and then the person would respond by making a different quote box for every sentence of your post and respond to them individually and you would do that for like 3 days
Actually I was thinking of the super exclusive beta AP.net 2.0 that Jason had temporarily allowed people on to test or whatever
I answered No because the way I used AP was exactly the same as how I use Chorus currently (excluding my humble beginnings on AP as a pathetic "troll" account in PL forums lol); just sticking to a few threads & posting about things I'm interested in. I never really got to grips with forum culture and could not make any friends etc. and I feel those that are nostalgic for AP are nostalgic for the people they met on there rather than anything to do with the site itself. While AP was more toxic I genuinely feel that whenever drama happened on this site it became a bit nastier & more personal than things seemed to get on AP? Maybe that's just me mis-remembering, and thankfully the overall vibe is, clearly, much more kind on here like 95% of the time. But generally I feel like the internet as a whole has changed and the overall majority of people use apps like Twitter, which draws in the toxic shitheads that you'd find in AP news threads because, hell, why be horrible to forum users posting about their favourite bands when you can be directly horrible to the bands themselves lol. So even though Chorus may not have the influence in the scene that AP had, it also does not have the negative effects that come with that. E.g. when users shit-talk someone like Cody Payne on here he doesn't create an account and shit-talk back
When "making money didn't matter" ... would that be ... uh ... 2005 when I graduated college and desperately needed the website to make money so I could eat food and pay rent and thankfully was able to team up with the people at IndieClick to create a sustainable business back when web ads actually paid a decent amount? Is that when it didn't matter? For basically its entire existence from roughly 2002 until I closed it down? Cause it fucking mattered to me because it's how I literally paid my bills and I stressed about it constantly to the determinant of my own health. I'm going to lose my mind if I have to read anything else Jack Appleby has to say about anything. I need to get offline before I get more angry.
Sorry for bringing down the vibe in the thread, but revisionist history about my life is fricking wild.