Blogger Spotlight: Tim Dickinson, The Blue Walrus

The Blue Walrus (TBW) was created in 2006 by digital entrepreneur Tim Dickinson, to share his passion for eclectic new music and post monthly mixtapes which others could enjoy. Now alongside his team of music enthusiasts, The Blue Walrus is still a haven for discovering new tracks and alternative artists. In this spotlight Tim, who recently appeared on our top ten music blog ranking, chats to us about not chasing trends, introducing their readers to new talent, working with brands, and reveals the exciting projects he is currently working on. 

What inspired you to start blogging? Whilst at university in Edinburgh I was going to a lot of gigs and making a lot of mixtapes for parties and road trips. Music blogs weren’t really a thing back in 2006 but I thought the web offered a way to share my musical finds with a wider audience.

What type of music motivates you to create content for your blog? I grew up making electronica and playing the drums in a variety of bands from jazz and blues to rock’n’roll, so the blog was always going to be quite eclectic to reflect that. If I, or one of our other writers, love a song then it will get featured on the Walrus – we really aren’t pinned down to any particular genre.

What makes your blog different to other music blogs? The Blue Walrus is a music blog in the traditional sense that we only feature songs and artists we love – we feel no pressure to review everything that comes out or compete with the likes of NME. Our readers/listeners come to us to find their new favourite sound, not reviews of an album from bands they already know. We challenge their musical comfort zone, which is something the clever algorithms at Spotify cannot do.

How have you built your relationship with your audience? We’ve been going ten years, and I think that has let us build a platform slowly and organically. The blog, the video Tumblr, the Twitter and Facebook accounts all give our readers new ways to find our about new music, and this is aided by regular live shows where we put on some of our favourite bands.

What are the main challenges that you face as a music blogger? Time. Music blogging is a lot of fun but not a profitable exercise, and so finding the time to go to all the gigs and sift through my mailbag and inbox to uncover the diamonds in the rough can be tough.

What is the most exciting campaign that you’ve worked on? We work with all kinds of brands for sponsored playlists and giveaways, but my favourite we worked on recently was the Glastonbury gig guide we put together for insurance startup Cuvva. They were launching their car-insurance-by-the-hour app at the festival and were keen to offer our readers a discount to help them share the drive to and from Worthy Farm. It was a product I felt our readers would genuinely appreciate, and the sponsorship meant that we could spend more time going through the long lists of everyone playing at the festival and put together what we thought would be the best musical experience for every minute. The guide was widely shared on social media and Cuvva found it worked for them in getting word of mouth about the app, so a success all round!

How can PRs improve their approach when building relationships with you? PRs that take the time to find out the sort of music we might cover and then focus on sending us those demos are filtered to the to in my inbox.

Which artist do you think will make a big impact in 2017? Skott is probably my favourite artist right now – she’s making inventive and original pop that few can match, and she’s only just started.

Will you be working on any exciting projects this year? I’m currently working on a project with a number of other UK music bloggers to try and help music fans go to more live gigs. It’s in the early stages, but we’ll hopefully have something together in a few months. Other than that, we’ll be doing more with putting our playlists on Spotify alongside Soundcloud, and just continuing to do what we do.

Do you have any advice that you would like to share with aspiring bloggers? Be original and focus on bands and artists that you love rather than what might be “hot” right now. Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music do a good job showing people new acts they know they will like because they sound similar to bands they already do – bloggers are there to dig deeper and push people out of their comfort zones.