I have made a decision to discontinue Dismuke's Hit of the Week.  Replacing it will be an all new Dismuke's 78 RPM BLOG which will feature a similar assortment of recordings and a somewhat similar but modified format.   Between blog updates, I will also be sending out additional postings through Twitter with recommendations and links to vintage recordings elsewhere on the Internet.   

All previously posted Hit of the Weeks will continue to remain online and available as an archive. So nothing that is here now will be going away - it is just that new content will now be posted to the blog.

One reason for starting anew is the fact that rapidly advancing technology has rendered certain aspects of the Hit of the Week site somewhat obsolete.  When I first started the Hit of the Week updates, most people still connected to the Internet through dial up.   At the time, Real Audio was the most friendly and widely used format for streaming audio through dial up connections.  Since that time, the format has been slowly dying off and many people no longer find it to be user friendly.   Furthermore, the audio files prior to my acquisition of audio restoration equipment in late 2003 are of poor quality when compared with my efforts of more recent years.

Starting again from scratch will enable me to take advantage of modern, automated blogging software - in this case, WordPress.   No longer having to do the html for each update and manually archiving previous updates will make things easier for me and save time. Anything that can minimize the amount of time and work needed to publish an update will enable me to publish more frequently.   Plus modern blogging software automatically provides features such as RSS feeds and social networking tools which would be cumbersome and time consuming to add manually to each individual posting.

I entertained the possibility of moving the Hit of the Week over to WordPress.  But to do so would require manually migrating over a decade's worth of postings as well as updating all of the files to a more modern audio format.  That would be a huge project that I simply do not have time for.   From a logistical standpoint, it is simpler and less time consuming to start anew.

Another reason for the change is it gives me an opportunity to move to a more relaxed format that will be less time consuming and thus will enable me to post more frequently.   Over time, the Hit of the Week updates evolved into a format where each updated offered  a main update with multiple updates and often a short essay plus an "extra" update with multiple recordings and a second short essay.   They were fun to put together - but when I became busy with other things, the time required to put them together, at times, made them seem more like a burden than a hobby.

Under the new format I anticipate more frequent postings - but each individual posting will contain fewer recordings and somewhat less commentary.   Like the Hit of the Week updates, the new blog will feature vintage 78 rpm era recordings from a variety of musical genres.   But rather than each individual posting featuring vintage pop recordings plus "extra" recordings from other musical genres,  the blog will spread the recordings out across multiple postings.  So one posting might feature 1920s hot dance band recordings while the next might feature grand opera with the next one featuring a 1930s pop vocalist. 

Finally, the addition of Twitter updates will enable me to present great vintage recordings by pointing people to the work that other people on the web are doing to present and preserve the music.   One of the very nice things about Twitter is that it takes less than a minute to post a an update to it.  So if you find it worth your while following my new blog, you will also want to follow my Twitter updates because they will link you to similar recordings.

The address for the new blog is: