Motown Treasures

Greetings from The Sea of Tranquility ... 

I'm currently off on my travels and the sea as seen from my hotel room does look very tranquil, so I'm not in a position to post too often, but here are a few thoughts of mine.

I refuse to believe that Motown is in any way "dead", in my ordinary, everyday activities I regularly hear Motown being played in bars and on radio stations, mixed in with a whole lot of other stuff of course, and there seems to be just as much interest in people such as Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye and groups like The Supremes, The Temptations and Four Tops as ever.  The music is generally 50-60 years old so we shouldn't expect it to be regularly featured in the mainstream charts but I think it has aged very well.

With regard to MT I find that the strategy of The Boss (aka Humboldt/John etc. etc.) in posting a dozen or so new threads in weekly bursts often backfires, I find that I'm expected to watch and comment on videos that are often half an hour long (or more) and I don't always have the time to do this so I leave it for "later" only to find that it disappears as the MT Software has marked it as "read" which isn't exactly true!!

I also have issues with the "show unread posts" facility as I find that it only lists threads for three or four times before the MT software assumes that I'm not interested in them and stops displaying them ... so if 10 new threads are started and I look at three or four of them the system makes the others disappear ... Yes I know that there is always the "show all unread threads" facility but it is irritating that I should need to look there.

Personally I think that there are too many "minor" threads on here ... I don't think we need individual threads for each "Live" performance of a song by Gladys Knight as an example, just one "Live Performances" thread in the Gladys Knight section where people can post anything they have found ... same for The Supremes,  Marvin Gaye, Marvelettes, Elgins, Stevie Wonder etc. etc. etc. of course.  I'm thinking of creating something like the "Ed Sullivan" thread or the "Motown Not On Motown" thread, lots of great stuff following the same theme and all in one place  ... sometimes less really is more and rather than having 20 threads with 10 views each we would have one thread with 200+ views which would look a whole lot better.  Over the past few years I've posted a few "New Music" threads featuring recently recorded music that I think will appeal to fans of "Classic Motown", in retrospect it would have been better if I'd created one "New Music" thread and put them all in one place.

As I'm typing this I'm listening to Mr Snakepit's Motown show via the NMFM "play again" facility  ... I'd ask Mr Snakepit to reconsider his position regarding WestGrand ... new releases do need to be supported, even if the people behind them appear to be imperfect and, who knows, maybe the EMails got directed into their recipient's Spam Folder ... I occasionally look in my Spam folder and find all manner of "Legitimate" EMails in there!!

Anyway, must dash, it's approaching time for me to lift off again.   

Roger