At this time of year there are numerous ‘reviews’ of the past year or ‘Top Ten’ whatever being posted, but I decided a few years ago that I wouldn’t be adding to those. Instead, I always like to post to express my thanks to many people and look back at the past year for “NI Rocks”. As always, a big thanks to anyone who takes the time to listen to a Show, read something on the Rock Radio NI website or interact in any way on social media. And a special thanks to all the PR companies, record labels, agents and bands who have worked with us over the past year.


 

 

The Rock Radio NI Shows

We’re into Year 8 for the NI Rocks Shows on Rock Radio NI – over the past year these have moved to being available only from the On Demand Player or iTunes as the live feed as gone. I make no claims to be a DJ (or journalist for that matter) and that is probably very evident but I enjoy putting together the Shows featuring tracks I like along with the occasional interview. The emphasis remains on promoting local music and playing a mix of classic rock tunes and new releases.


This year, I uploaded 52 episodes of the NI Rocks A-Z Show and 51 of the Friday NI Rocks Show. In November I completed another cycle through A to Z after playing almost 1,000 tracks by different artists and am very close to our 400th A-Z Show. During 2017, on the 52 Shows uploaded, I played tracks by over 730 artists.

The 51 Friday NI Rocks Shows uploaded included interviews with 22 guests as well as over 870 tracks by 334 different artists. I took a look at which bands appeared most often on the Show – 48 appeared five times or more and 11 appeared ten times or more. Seven of those 11 were local bands and the other four were artists that were guests on the Show (one of the Shows featured a re-run of three interviews and four tracks by each band which gives them a bit of a boost in the number of overall plays). The most played artists on the Friday NI Rocks Show during 2017 were Kobra and the Lotus (22), Trucker Diablo (19), Blackwater Conspiracy (16), Gasoline Outlaws (14), Unleash The Archers (13), Baleful Creed (11), Safire (11), Stormzone (11), Screaming Eagles (10), Devilskin (10) and Janet Gardner (10).

 

Monthly playlists for both Shows are posted on the Rock Radio NI website and e-mailed to the many PR companies and record labels who work with us. (Each show is available for about 8 weeks after upload should something on the playlist spark your fancy).


Interviews

Over the past year I posted 24 interviews on the Rock Radio NI website – that included 22 that were broadcast on the Friday NI Rocks Show. Thanks to all my guests – Jizzy Pearl, Blaze Bayley, Tommy from Stone Trigger, Jeff Hoad from The Rich and Famous, James Durbin (Quiet Riot), Jimi Bell from House of Lords, Tave Wanning (Adrenaline Rush), Liv Jagrell from Liv Sin, Harry Hess, the guys from Devilskin, Ryan from Airbourne, Tyler Bryant, Brittney Slayes (Unleash The Archers), Janet Gardner (Vixen), Kobra from Kobra and the Lotus, Jymmy from Bobaflex, Rick from Every Mother’s Nightmare, Fredrik from Sparzanza, Tom from Trucker Diablo, Phil Lewis (L.A. Guns), George Harris from The Raven Age and Jocke from Hardcore Superstar. Thanks also to Shallow Side and Owl Company for doing interviews for me by e-mail.

Those Shows that include guest interviews are uploaded to the NI Rocks MixCloud site after a few weeks and there are now 62 uploads featuring 69 interviews on the page – https://www.mixcloud.com/NIRocks/

 

Album Recommendations

The number of album recommendations that I post continues to increase each year and in 2017 there were 141 posted – evidence of how much great music there is out there. I’m not a fan of reviews but hopefully the recommendations fulfil their purpose of highlighting the quality of the music out there and perhaps getting people to check out new albums. My thanks again to the many labels, PR companies and artists that have shared music with us over the last year and who continue to work with us.

 

Social Media

Social media is becoming increasingly challenging for people like myself who run non-profit making, promotional sites rather than businesses – getting your post seen by more than a hundred people is difficult unless you pay or others are good enough to like or share your posts. The dedicated NI Rocks social media sites on Facebook (2,617 likes) and Twitter (4,330 followers) continue to expand at a slow but steady rate nevertheless. My Instagram account is part NI Rocks / part personal, but also continues to grow.


YouTube

The NI Rocks YouTube channel passed a couple of significant milestones towards the end of 2017. We now have well over 1,000 subscribers and over a million views of the videos on the channel.

 

Competitions

I’ve continued to work with The Limelight / Shine to run competitions on a regular basis and have also done some for SD Entertainment. My thanks to them for providing the prizes and to everyone who has entered the competitions over the past year. We had 38 lucky winners during 2017.