Hello to all the amazing people who read our site, we love you. Really, your participation in this website makes everything worth it.  Every time you visit, it counts as only good stuff for us as a group.  So, thank you….

If you will remember, a few months back, we announced that we were going to tone things down a little bit on the site.  At the time, we were putting up three posts a day, beginning to build our artist database, and trying to manage our emerging “ezine” persona.  In all honesty, we never intended to use The One21 as a magazine-type website. Our original idea for this blog was to simply communicate our passion and try to begin to introduce the world to a larger perspective of “Christian music”in modern culture.

Well, God, as He always does, has His own plans for things, and seven months in to our existence we were doing interviews,  reporting on news, and in general acting like more of a magazine.

However, the true intention of this site, The One21 Music, was to build a tool that could fully introduce the people to the vast body of music made by believers. So, in May, we officially began to build our artists database. We started strong, found out we weren’t doing it right, started over, added a few features, went back and added those features to the existing profiles, went back and edited, and then once again began to add new artists, and here we are.

Confused? Dont worry, all of that was my long way of saying that we are now 260 artists strong in our database, and every week we are adding on average 6-10 new entries.  The profiles span over 10 genres, 3 categories, and over 120 styles (sub-genres).  We are doing our best to make sure that any fan, of any type of music will have a place on this website.  You can go see our progress by clicking on the “Artist Search” tab up at the top of this page, or you can click here.
Also, if there is particular artist you want to check out, you can get to them quickly by typing in www.one21music.com/(artist name) into the address bar on your browser (so an example would be www.one21music.com/owl city).  If you dont get anything, it most likely means we have not gotten that particular artist into the system yet, but don’t fret because we are working on it.

Alright, with so much going on, Chuck and I thought it would be a good idea to start giving you guys weekly rundowns on what is happening here on the site.  So at the end of the week, we will recap what we have been writing about on the blog, in the database, and what is happening in our company.  Our hope is that not only will you stay up to date to what is happening on the blog, and what new artists you may want to check out, but also that you would get to know us as people and as a company. So, here we go, this our first real update so I hope you enjoy:

General Site Updates:

-First of all, you may notice that we have a new banner. The old one was cool and everything, but as we turn the corner on this website, we wanted to go with something a bit “cleaner” looking. Plus, I (Ian) was really tired of looking at myself every time I looked at the site (yes, if you remember the guy in the banner, that was a big ‘ol profile of me, myself, and I).

-We launched our “Album Release” page this week. this page contains dates, titles, and album artwork(when available) for all the upcoming CDs from Christian artists. It will be updated often, and in future “update” posts I will keep you up to date on what we have added to the page. Go check out all the upcoming releases here.

-We got rid of our “Music Artists” and “Christian Labels” tabs. With the database, we don’t need the “Artist” tab, although you may see a newer, more accessible version of it pop up in the near future. All the information from the “Christian Labels” can now be found in our “Links” page. You can click on the “Links” tab at the top of the page or just click here

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Blog/Article Updates:

-New Releases-The big release this week came from MuteMath, but Manic Drive and Take It Back! also released somke new stuff this week.
-Music News- new videos from John Reuben, Paramore, and Philmont, along with new album info for Abandon Kansas, and a lot of bands leaving their labels and others getting signed.
-Free Download- a new little DJ album from hip-hop artist Playdough. Very strange, but hard to pass up for free.
-Voices Of The Underground2 Pt.1- Begin a new “season” of our round table interview series by asking Thousand Foot Krutch, White Collar Sideshow, Gileah Taylor, and many others what they love about music.

Artist Database Updates:

-Chuck has moved around some genre definitions to best suite our Praise & Worship, and Gospel fans.

Profiles added:
Moby
Owl City
Mindy Smith
Adrienne Young
Iris Dement
MuteMath
Son Lux
Buddy Miller
Bodies Of Water
The Welcome Wagon
Sufjan Stevens
Danielson
Josh Garrels
Listener
Preson Phillips
Gileah Taylor (Gileah & The Ghost Train)
Wonder
Love Begotten
Bradley Hathaway

Also, this weekend we will be holding a meeting to try and figure out a possible One21 Fest here in Austin, Texas. If you are reading this and have some ideas, please speak up. Until next week, God bless, and have a great weekend.

Christian Music Is Not A Genre, It Is A Movement