Well, this has been a long time coming and probably won’t actually surprise anyone but we’re closing down.
A few people I’ve mentioned this to have asked the same question: “why?!” Well, it’s pretty simple; 7BitArcade isn’t the site it used to be. At one point I remember working with a team of 20+ writers, with regular reviews, event coverage, original content but now we’re lucky if we have a couple of articles a week on the site. It’s not really anyone’s fault (okay, maybe it’s my fault in places) – when we started a lot of our writers were students getting a bit of experience before attempting to get jobs in this field of work. We’ve never been able to pay writers, the site isn’t exactly profitable, and so keeping people onboard wasn’t exactly easy. As a lot of our writers got towards the end of their courses, or moved into the working world, obviously they got busier and had less time to review albums, go to shows or come up with original features. Originally this wasn’t a problem, new people would come in and things kept on rolling but, over the years, this has got harder and harder to maintain – I put this down to age more than anything else, it’s not like I can go out and recruit first year students as writers now. Editorially we all got busier too, we all have lives and jobs and it was never easy to balance everything and keep it moving at a pace we’d have liked. Every so often we’d get a flurry of activity but it’d always plateau at a slow pace. The last slump has lasted a bit too long and we took the decision to start preparing to close.
It’s honestly pretty gutting to be doing this, which is why I’ve perhaps put it off for longer than I should have. 7BitArcade has been the last four years of my life, it’s introduced me to a lot of people I’d have otherwise never met (mostly for the better!), it’s provided opportunities I never thought I’d be part of and of course it brought massive highs when it did well (which, all negativity aside, it often did).
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s been involved in the site in some way or another – it’s been a rocky road, for sure, but a hell of a lot of people made this possible. Adam, for setting up this monstrosity and eventually moving from a gaming oriented site to an entirely music site and then attempting to experiment in other fields. He set all of this up, worked his absolute arse off to get contact and to take every opportunity to get interesting content. Previous editors; Natt, Andy, Harry “The Powerhouse” Bandell (If you read this, I hope you’re well), Lindsay on the live front – they all put in the equivalent of a full time job’s worth of hours to make this happen and to get it going. Thank you. When it came to sessions we did some excellent things considering our size, thanks largely to Michael who was happy to film anything at any time without any fuss and always got good results. Thanks to Alex too, while not officially part of the site he essentially hosted our live sessions and made everything sound excellent. There’s been too many writers and contributors over the years to individually pick on them but thanks for giving up a part of your time to write about stuff you love (or hate). Thanks to our friends at PRs, labels, bands, for giving us stuff to write about, sorting out stuff that we still can’t believe happened (a session with Owls, man. Did that actually happen?)
You’re all excellent and I hope everything is working out great for you.
If you’re still reading this I’d like to share some of my highlights over the years:
–Harry pissing off TWIABP (”You’re a pisser Harry”)
-That time Adam text me because Frank Turner posting a link to the excellent interview with Rob crashed the website.
-Our idea of frequent meetings being held at Camden Wetherspoons. They might not let us keep our trophy there but damn, what a sensible location.
-Sessions. We got to film some ridiculous ones. Owls was mindblowing. Johnny Foreigner was a fun lesson in how to actually do live sessions (a bit of a mess on our part, in retrospect but thanks massively to them for allowing us to film it as our first live session). Dingus was crazy. We had fun doing acoustic sessions too, filming at festivals, that insane Human Pyramids sessions. These things were all incredibly hard work but I feel proud watching them. And I rarely feel pride.
-Festivals. Having a 7BitArcade stage at ArcTanGent 2014 was pretty excellent but getting to cover festivals was amazing. From the Alternative Escape right up to Glastonbury, we covered them all. I still can’t believe we were allowed to, in some cases.
– Radio. It still seems a bit unreal that we appeared on Radio 1’s review show multiple times, as well as Amazing Radio. Thank’s so much to Edith Bowman and her team for inviting us on the show, and allowing us back, letting us champion music we love to the whole nation.
-The parties, the people. While I’m god awful at keeping up to date with people, 7Bit has had some excellent folk involved with it over the years. Our old awards shows and Adam/Lindsay’s legendary halloween parties gave opportunities to find out how excellent everyone is in person and were definitely some of the most fun nights out ever.
All in all though, I think we gave this thing a good run. We’ve covered a hell of a lot over the past four years, been to a lot of places, met some interesting people. Thank you all for being part of it, even if it was just reading the site. It’s sad to say goodbye but it’s for the best.
Bye.
x
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