Music for Gaming (a Google+ page)

Music for Gaming started out as a platform to showcase some gaming videos I was making for the music I was creating, as well as compositions by other somewhat similar artists. Unfortunately the videos ended up being far more time-consuming than I anticipated and I wasn't able to post as regularly as I wanted. I was also finding way more cool music on SoundCloud than I had videos for at the time, and so it morphed into a showcase of mostly instrumentals that I thought made good background music for all sorts of gaming, sans the videos (although I still have the YouTube channel for future endeavors). Whether you were just kicking back playing low intensity things like solitaire and Mahjong, or doing high intensity stuff like dungeons and raids and PvP, the goal was to create a playlist to suit your needs.

At first, the MfGRs (Music for Gaming Recommendations) were a simple introduction and a link to the song, but then around MfGR #30 or so I decided to dig a little deeper and provide some information about the song and/or artist as well as the reason the track was chosen. I think it was around MfGR #40 or so that I decided to start doing trilogies and named each segment after entertainment act/baseball (go Tribe!) terms: The Opener, The Setup & The Closer.

Anyway, right around MfGR #100 I decided to create a spreadsheet to help ensure that I didn't double-post a track and I also had the idea to start writing the little snippets as if I were writing in basic code because:

A.) It gave me a consistent structure for the typical information about each track (artist, platform, etc...)

B.) Writing in code fit with the electronic music theme, which is what the majority of the songs on MfG are, with the main exception being the Throwback Thursday tracks which tend to be classic rock/metal instrumentals...

-and-

C.) It fit with my branding. Part of becoming "Jimmy G 2-point-oh" (from JiMiGnet -pronounced Jimmy Geez Net) was understanding that the web experience had changed and become "the web 2.0" with all the programming leaning towards social media and cloud platforms.

As I neared MfGR #200, I decided that since I'm also a bit of a 'stats' guy, it would be fun to start putting in the number of plays and likes each track had at the time of posting, which eventually led to the 'like percentage' (the number of likes divided by the number of plays). It was meant to encourage some of the less popular artists as their tracks would tend to have a higher percentage versus tracks with multi-thousands and multi-millions of plays. I added the caveat of explaining that a low percentage was often due to the same person playing the track several times after they liked it or possibly even listener apathy ("I like the track, but It's too much trouble to click the like button!") so as to not infuriate the more popular artists with a tendency of low 'like' percentages. It's arbitrary anyway as the stats will completely change by the following day.

Once I hit MfGR #250, I figured I stick with it until I hit #500 and then I would cut back from the 'almost' nightly posts, but a funny thing happened as I neared #500 -the views doubled! Seemingly overnight the total views jumped from almost 11,000 to nearly 25,000! I was floored! (This was before G+ changed their UI and you could see the total views by simply visiting your page. Now you have to click a button and you can only go back 30 days.) Well, now I had to keep going until at least #750, and possibly #1,000. So that's what I did and that's where we stand today.

This is by no means the end of the MfGRs, but I will be taking an extended break to get my social music sites in order and spend some time finishing up my own trilogy of Music for Gaming. Stay tuned!