Polyphonic Press started as a YouTube channel in the spring of 2011. The initial idea for the channel was for me to review new albums that were coming out. It was a project that I had wanted to do for a long time, but life circumstances always got in the way of me putting it together. But by the time I started the channel, I was ready.
After doing for about a year or so, I decided that I wanted to incorporate my friend Jon in this thing because he was obsessed with music as much as I was, maybe even more so. So we decided to start a podcast. Since this podcast was an extension of the YouTube channel, we simply called it “The Polyphonic Press Podcast”. Don’t try to look for it, all the episodes have since disappeared from the internet. The idea was to talk about current events in the music industry. We had three stories we would cover over the course of an hour, and we would talk about it and dissect it. It gave me the knowledge on how a podcast actually worked. The thing is nobody really listened to it, because I didn’t understand the first thing about SEO, so every episode would get buried.
Eventually, we just said we would start making videos on the YouTube channel and so it became a hybrid of album reviews and current event type videos. Keeping a YouTube channel up with content is a lot of work, and I eventually got burnt out. I decided to step away from YouTube after having done it for almost five years.
Another extension of the YouTube channel was a website. I learned a lot about building websites through WordPress, and I decided I wanted to go back to school to learn web development. I wanted a new career and something that could give me a comfortable while not totally hating the work I do. I learned a lot and I’m proud to say I now have a job in that new career direction. However, I eventually started to miss making content about music.
Eventually I called up Jon with an idea. I had taken a list of albums from the book “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” as well as Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and a few other sources and made a web application that displayed an album at random. The idea was to create a podcast where we review classic albums, but at the start of the show we have no idea what album we’re going to listen to. In essence, the show would be our initial reaction to listening the album. So that’s the show we have now. There are several podcasts that review classic albums, but I feel that what makes ours unique is the that we don’t know what we’re going to hear when we start recording. It really keeps us on our toes.