No blog has had as many phase-changes as SKD. It all started out as a place for recommendations, but I soon found that it only made me look like a fool for sleeping on albums for so long then acting like nobody had heard them before. Along with this though, I was writing reviews on new albums, fairly decent reviews too with plenty of insight. Laziness soon kicked in and I added three new guys as editors. My homie from Oslo, Pål. Saku from Finland and Daniel “Stelf” from England. They took care of most of the reviews/recommendations for awhile, things were going fine and the blog was purple. I was posting more and more new songs and videos while asking the others to relax on the recommendations in a desperate attempt to stay/become relevant and boosting my visitor count.

 

That worked alright, but then Twitter came around. I was now starting to seriously networking with other bloggers and artists alike. I got the idea to interview artists, but in a different way. Ask the artists about stuff not remotely related to their music. I’ve always been striving originality, and this style of interviewing would also require the least amount of background knowledge about the interviewee. “Unrelated Dialogues” I called them, lazy, half-assed five-minute pseudo-interviews. I had never heard of 6th Sense, landed an “Unrelated Dialogue” with 6th Sense. I didn’t really enjoy Donnie Goines’ music, landed an “Unrelated Dialogue” with Donnie Goines. I was listening to Black Milk, a lot. Crash-landed a phone “Unrelated Dialogue” with Black Milk. He sounded like the questions were an insult to his creativity and achievements in the music industry. It wasn’t intended as such, but still it was a juvenile, irrelevant and useless interview. Still I was proud, one of very few norwegian 17-yearolds with 6-monthold blogs that had interviewed one of the very best hip-hop producers in the world, if you could call it an interview.

 

Fast-forwarding to one of my primer moments. The weekend before February 10th I decided to put together one of my most successful projects that reached out to many great artists. The questions was “What’s your top 10 dilla beats”, but was later changed to “What 10 dilla beats touched you the most?” after some back and fourth with Jeff Jank. Several artists, some very close to dilla gave me their lists, Illa J, Guilty Simpson, 88-keys and others. The post is still online.

 

Then SKD went silent for a long time. Arguably because of my new passion; web-design. I was too busy redesigning my site instead of keeping it updated. But eventually, the redesign was here and the format completely different. This new format was just like any other music blog, brief and only new music. I kept redesigning and it turned into a showcase of my web-design/js skills instead of my blogging. Sometimes to the degree where I would avoid posting something, like a video, to keep the site XHTML compliant. SKD 2.0-1 has always been XHTML compliant by the way, but what difference does that make for a music blog?

 

Therefore, I’ve decided to discontinue SofaKing Diligent. It’s by far the best-looking music blog in the world and the content is pretty nice. But that content can be found everywhere else and a blog trying to emphasize how music is everything while focusing so much on the blog appearance itself, that’s nothing less than hypocritical. I’m also in a place in my life where time is very limited, I need to prioritize and will henceforth stop spending time on reproducing Stones Throw press releases with my own words while figuring out new ways to say “I like this, this is original.”

 

I’ll still be here, my internet presence will still be very… present. I will continue to designing web-sites and blogs, some really nice ones are coming up. But as far as SKD goes, this is as far as SKD goes.

 

SKD has never really been relevant, but it has been appreciated. And I want to thank absolutely everyone for that, readers, commenters, artists, supporters, bloggers, blogrollers, twitterers and retweeters. In the most subtle and insignificant ways, it’s been amazing, for myself merely. Never had more than 300 visitors a day, never made a dime from it, never jumpstarted the next big artist on his way to stardom, but I did a little, I did something. I am immensely satisfied with the little I did and the little attention I got.

 

Thank you. Really.

 

Sincerely,
Magnus Mathisen