I don’t know about you, but I always notice whenever there’s a new band posted on this blog because I have to make a new category for it. The thing is, I have also noticed that I’m making new categories much less often recently. Just look at the numbers. We had about 6 or 7 months of solid posting time in 2007 since the site was created and made 167 new band categories, but so far in the first 3 months of 2008 we have only listed 19 new bands. Yes, this is partially explained by the fact that a lot of the news now is about bands we’ve already talked about before so there won’t be a new category, but I think it’s necessary to keep talking about new bands and keep the content fresh for you… and hopefully present some new and interesting musicians that are less known.

So here’s the plan: Germaniac.com will present 100 new bands in 2008. We are going to pick up the pace to show you just how deep and varied German music can be in our never-ending quest to give you new music you never knew about. 100 bands new to Germaniac with 100 new band categories, that’s our goal for this year. And by the end of the year, we will have discussed over 250 bands in total. Sound good?

The image above is a collage made with just some of the albums we have covered so far
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You may have noticed some strange things going on here during the past 24 hours. The site was experiencing some technical difficulties yesterday so anything weird you may have noticed was just me trying to get everything fixed. I had to make some adjustments to the database and reload the blog, but everything seems to be working properly again. The only little problem that remains is that we somehow lost the About pages in the side menu during the repair process, but I will remake those soon. If anyone sees any other problems, please send an email to germaniacdotcom@gmail.com and let me know, thanks.

For the past few months, I have been trying to figure out what I was thinking when I designed the first logo for Germaniac.com. I must have been in some kind of nautical mood because it resembled a life preserver and really didn’t fit the theme of this site. So I decided to remake the logo, and this time I made sure it actually looks like something you might see from a band. It also incorporates a letter “G” for Germaniac, naturally. What do you think? Do you like this new logo? Is it terrible? Post a comment and let me know. (If you can’t see it at the top of the site, try refreshing your browser.)

Just a quick note…

You may have noticed that the website was offline for a few days. We experienced some problems, but everything is back to normal now and I will continue posting some news articles for this weekend. I should also have a nice concert review for you after And One plays New York on Sunday.

Anyone who runs a website on their own knows that it’s not free, and it can even get a little expensive when you’ve got multiple hosting accounts and tons of domain names like I do in my little web empire. The money to keep sites like Germaniac.com running smoothly has to come from somewhere. The thing is, I don’t want to insert Google ads and huge banners all over the place because I hate them as much as you do, so I have decided to have a special CD sale to raise some money for the site. It’s the best solution I can think of. You get some new music and support one of your favorite websites at the same time.

I am selling 136 CDs! Some of them are albums that I have somehow aquired more than one copy of in my own personal collection which I don’t need, and others are CDs that I just don’t listen to anymore as my tastes have changed. There are brand new CDs that I have aquired from various bands that I have helped over the years. And I will also be including special discounts on all CDs from the official band shops I operate on Stahlhammer.org and Schmerzwerk.com. All together, a wide variety of genres are accounted for in these CDs, and the bands come from all around the world (although you can be sure there are a lot of German bands in there).

Also for sale are all 4 Radio Goethe compilations which will benefit the RG program and independent radio. Each one has dozens of songs by a variety of German bands packed onto 2 CDs and they cost just $5 each! I honestly can’t think of a better way to introduce yourself or your friends to such a wide range of great German music.

If you want to see what’s for sale, just head on over to this page. All instructions you will need to order are listed there as well. Thanks for your support!

I have finally created the 2008 Release Dates page (see the link over there in the menu?). This is where I will be adding all the new albums and singles and videos and whatever else that gets released in the German music world. It’s kind of like a time machine. You can look into the future to see what’s coming out before I even write my usual posts about them. And once I do write about them, I’ll be sure to add a link to the post so you can check out all the details. I hope you find this page useful.

A few other items that will be coming soon:

Tour Calendar
A tour calendar will be added very soon. It will focus on North America since the main idea of this site is to promote German bands over here, but I may have some kind of secondary calendar for European tour dates as well.

Venue List
The venue list will be a large list of smallish concert halls and clubs across North America. The goal of posting this list is to make it easier for German bands to plan a tour here by providing them with enough information to get in contact with venues they could reasonably play at. I’ve already got over 200 in nearly every state and province, so far.

Got an idea for a new Germaniac.com feature? Let me know!

Now that the insanity of the holidays is behind us, let’s continue, shall we?

2008 is going to be a great year for German music. I am already looking forward to lots of album releases and even some American concerts that have already been planned. More info on all that to come soon. But first, I just wanted to let you know that the site is gearing up again, although you may notice a few minor changes over time. Have an awesome new year!

I haven’t updated this blog in a while, so I’m sorry to everybody who was reading it regularly. I have been busy the past few weeks thinking about a lot of different things including this site and what it was meant to be. I’m not sure it turned out to be what I originally wanted, so I have been figuring out various changes and improvements that I think will really help everyone. Having said that, I don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out in the end. We’ll just have to wait and see how it evolves.

For now, please accept my apologies and forgive me for not keeping the site up to date with the latest German music news. This site is not dead, it’s just… resting, I guess you could say. I will continue posting sometime in the near future. Stay tuned.

I have been building a big list of release dates for all kinds of German albums and singles and whatever other kind of music releases I can think of. It took a little while since I kept changing the formatting of it, but the release dates for September and October have finally been uploaded to the blog. Within the next few days, I hope to get the months of November through February set up and I will start adding release dates as soon as I find out about them. This way, you can look ahead to see what’s being released and start to get a little excited before I tell you all the details in a blog post.

The release dates are currently located in the right sidebar under the “About” heading. I have them sorted in pages by year right now, but I think I might separate them into monthly lists for convenience. When I actually get a whole year’s worth of releases on there, it’s going to be pretty long and might get confusing. What would you prefer? Let me know.

As you can see, Germaniac.com has just been overhauled with a brand new design scheme. Getting all of the little details just right has taken most of my time over the past few days, so I hope you like it. Write something in the Comments section and let me know what you think.

The new design in detail

In addition to the new look, there have also been some functional improvements as well. The biggest thing you will notice is the new collapsable categories list. I thought this would be a big help because the list of bands is getting so long. Now you will be able to see all the major categories at first, and if you want to see the sub-categories (like all the bands) you can just click on the plus sign (+) next to “Bands” and they will appear like magic. Pretty cool, huh?

The only problem in the new design that you might experience is a small shift in the position of the sidebar if you are using an old version of Internet Explorer. After much frustration and searching for an answer, it turns out that this is a flaw in the old IE software. IE versions 6 and lower have a lot of bugs and are generally pretty bad at displaying websites properly. There are also a lot of security issues with these older versions of Internet Explorer, so you should really upgrade to IE version 7. Or better yet, ditch Internet Explorer all together and download Mozilla Firefox for a much better browsing experience. If you do see any other problems, please let me know so I can take care of them.

Thank you

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has been reading Germaniac.com, sending in news and band info for me to write about, and promoting this blog everywhere you can. I am very proud to say that Germaniac.com continues to attract more and more visitors every month. In fact, in September the blog had over 10,000 visitors! That’s really great, and I hope more Germaniacs continue to join us in the future.

Thanks everybody! Please continue showing your support by spreading the word about German music and Germaniac.com!