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We are really excited to be able to share all the things that Four on Four (FOF) has been up to over the past couple of years and because we haven't published a State of FOF edition in a while, it's time to give some updates on what we've accomplished recently and our direction going forward.
For starters, last year we introduced the concept of ‘channels’ to brand the different types of genres that our resident DJ Alexander spins. We began this journey starting with the epic trance genre and the Systematik channel and then rolled out the Amp.FM channel as a home for the EDM style. Our lounge music channel, Rust, took it’s name from the familiar line of Rust mixes which have existed for some time. Continuing on the trend, we renamed the future house content to Brise & Soleil and are turning it into more of a tropical house style. Lastly we introduced Bloom, which is our progressive trance channel.
DJ Alexander continues to be our resident DJ and will be on point for bringing new amazing mixes and content to these channels.
Last year we spent some time re-designing the logo for Four and Four which has gone through some iterations. We also made changes to the look and feel of the website, and changed our DJ intros to match the theme. Along with these branding changes, we standardized content both with the dj intros, the mix covers, as well as images for news articles and carousel slides. This was all with the desire to minimize the time we spend on art creative. By doing this we were also able to automate and alleviate some of the effort required to maintain the site content.
This past year we increased our social channels with the addition of YouTube and TikTok. These new social channels were introduced as part of a major feature that we started early this year - live DJ streams. We are in the process of fine-tuning the presentation and look and feel for theseand will be leveraging YouTube and TikTok channels to store those live stream recordings, some of which we’ll talk about here in a bit.
As another milestone our Mixcloud numbers have now surpassed 500 followers and we continue to grow our family base on all channels. To all our fans, thank you!
Looking Ahead
We are well into starting live DJ streams on Mixcloud and we will be recording those sessions and posting them on our YouTube channel as well as on our official website. Along with that we are also starting a series called Transitions to highlight some of Alexander's best transitions off of his live sets and capture those in video. We will be posting editions of Transitions on our TikTok channel.
The Tracks of the Week series has been on pause for the last few months but will be resuming here in April. The series will change slightly and will highlight and review a single track every week. Any of the tracks that are part of the series and end up in live dj streams will be called out as part of our live dj stream recordings on YouTube.
FOF Essentials has been a foundational series for us and will continue for the foreseeable future. We don't plan any changes there with the exception that, we will highlight any FOF Essentials on the recordings of live mixes, just like we will for the Track of the Week seriesl.
We will be rolling out some new sections to the official website to highlight new upcoming festivals and DJ concerts as well as notable clubs around the world.
On the channels front, we are introducing content for a new channel around house music. That channel will be called Fabric. We are also going to be rolling out content for the Fishmouth channel to cover the progressive house genre.
From the website perspective we are rolling some UI enhancements to make things more intuitive and legible with larger images, larger text, and labels on icons. We are focusing on decluttering the site by removing any text that is no longer needed.
We plan to extend the advanced search feature to give the user the ability to search on various parameters independently - for example with BPM, harmonic key, and genre. This is contrast to how the feature works today where the all parameters need to be provided in order for the search to work.
One major feature that we are considering for the site is the ability to schedule published content and roll it out automatically based on the timing of calendar events. This allows us to privately prepare content early and often to display it automatically when it’s the right time.
With those updates, we're excited for another year of Four and Four bringing you awesome mixes and electronic music. From DJ Alexander and everyone here at the Four on Four studio, a big thank you to our listeners!
Cheers,
Four on Four