What’s up fellow readers, friends, and artists!? As you can see, we’ve put in just a little bit of elbow grease and revamped the look of a-Tunes.net. Most of the functionality is business as usual, however, we have added on important feature. On the main page, you will now see a post slider that will showcase a few of our featured posts! This helps us put a few articles front and center, to make sure you don’t miss them.

Note the new Post Slider

Other than that, we’ll likely be making minor adjustments over the next few days, but nothing drastic. Please feel free to let us know whether you like, love, hate, etc, the new look. We want to make sure that you guys enjoy coming here! This is now our 6th major site revamp since we started back in 2008. For a history of our logos, see below – in reverse chronological order.

Thanks for everything!

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You all won’t see this post until the waning minutes of 2011 (EST) but as I type this earlier on New Year’s Eve, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect and look back on the past year in the world a-Tunes. Here’s a few of the notable milestones along the way:

• We turned three in June. 3 years old and going strong. Crazy to think how we started as a tiny blog in 2008 and grew simply by word of mouth from all the amazing artists we cover and you, the reader. We couldn’t thank you enough.
• Speaking of growing, it was easily our best year yet in terms of readership and posts. Also, we’re not too far away from our 5000th post, and we couldn’t be more excited to see more and more artists putting themselves out there, following their dream and keeping us busy.
• We’ve had the amazing opportunity to either partner with and/or cover some incredible events. We started the year off on a great note by beginning partnerships with Inspire & Helping Hands and helped launch Inspire 2011 on the East coast. We also had the great chance to attend events like UMCP’s SPEAK, and Kollaboration Acoustic 5. We look to be even more involved with events such as these in 2012.
• As a thank you to all of our readers, we’ve given away iPods, music, pocket cams, and tickets to shows all across the country. We couldn’t be here without you and we want to make sure we show you our appreciation!

These are just a few of the memorable moments we’ve had in the past 365 days. For the next 366 (leap year!), we look to focus on providing you with more exclusive content (interviews, album reviews, etc) and doing all we can to continue to provide a platform for all of our artists, and a portal for all our readers. Over the course of the next week or so, we’ll be sharing some of our favorite releases and occasions regarding the artists. We’ll kick things off with a countdown of what I consider to be the best music videos from 2011.

If you’ve been with us since the beginning, thank you so much for sticking around. If you’ve joined us more recently or at any point in between, we’re more than elated to have you along – whether you’re an artist, a fan, or both. Here’s to an amazing 2012, filled with music. Happy New Year.

Wow, it’s been some time since you all heard any official news from our camp, hasn’t it? Today we’re happy to announce a new feature on our site called “Passport”. This section was created out of the joyous necessity to expand our news coverage because many of our favorite artists are beginning to go international – making waves all across the world. For instance, our biggest story over the past week is how Korean-American Ailee has garnered a lot of attention in Korea after appearing in one of their televised music competitions. It’s awesome to see our artists crossing languages, boundaries, and borders!

Now, we aren’t trying to compete with all the various J-Pop, K-Pop, LMNOP-Pop that are out there, but rather we just want to be able to help you all keep tabs on artists abroad that are focusing their career in other markets besides states-side. Over the next few weeks, we’ll start to re-brand older posts that fit this category and re-organize our archives. So with that, we hope you’re ready to travel the world via music with us!

This post is a little over due but we wanted to make sure we properly close out our Huge Spring Giveaway contest by letting everyone know the results and publicly congratulate the winners. We thought everything went really well and especially loved watching some of your Youtube submissions. So without further ado here’s how the breakdown went…

• Roughly 100 individuals entered
• ~20% of those who entered did so with a Youtube video (We really enjoyed these, thanks!)
• ~97% entered via Facebook
• ~85% entered via Twitter
• ~13% of those who entered did so via Youtube, Facebook & Twitter
• 3 of the 5 Winners entered via Youtube, Facebook & Twitter (Sharing a YT clip really did positively affect one’s chances)

Finally, let’s congratulate the winners! To respect their privacy we’ll just share their initials and state, along with the prize they ended up choosing.

1. 1st Place: CK of California – iPod Touch
2. 2nd Place: LN of New York – Creative Vado HD Camera
3. 3rd Place: CP of Nevada – BumpThis/a-Tunes Music Pack
4. 4th Place: JC of Maryland – iTunes Gift Card
5. 5th Place: TK of Pennsylvania – FM CD

On behalf of BumpThis & a-Tunes we just want to thank everyone for entering, and we hope to continue connecting with you online and elsewhere. Stay tuned for future contests and thanks again for your readership and support!

We’re always tweaking and changing things here at a-Tunes, all to make this the best possible place for you to come for information on Asian-American music. Sometimes we roll features out quietly and others we announce them with a bang. This particular post is a little bit more of the latter.

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Here we go! As a-Tunes.net continues to expand so does our need for fresh voices. That’s why I wanted to extend a warm welcome to our newest music news contributor, K. Kwon! You’ll be hearing (reading) a lot from him as he will help keep you updated on your favorite musicians. He’s already started so be on the lookout for posts by Introspector11!

Here’s a little bit about K. Kwon in his own words:

Who’s the newest member to a-tunes staff? Oh yeah that’s me, K.Kwon (Kae-Kwon)! I’m proud to say that I’m the youngest a-tunes staff member. Music was the best thing ever invented, I’m always listening to music and always looking out for new artists! I’ve only been following and involved in the Asian American music society for only about a year now but I’ve experienced some of the best music out there. People say you can figure out a person by the type of music they listen too which I believe is true but experience some of the greatest music out there today, here on a-tunes!

Contact:

E-mail: K.Kwon at a-Tunes.net
Twitter: @Itsyaboikwon
Tumblr: -era.tumblr.com
Other Site: introspector11.com

Welcome to the team K. Kwon!

And for everyone else, if you’re reading this like to join us too, read on to find out how!

In my mind this is really a noteworthy day. a-Tunes started way back in June of 2008 with just me, GT, at the helm. Then early this year, Music4UrSoul came on board as a part time contributor and west coast correspondent. But most of all it’s because of readers such as yourself that this site has continued to grow and expand. You help us discover new talent, heck a lot of you are the talent and we couldn’t be more thankful for supporters like you.

But the time has come again for the team to expand. Things are quickly becoming too overwhelming for our two person team, and quite frankly we could use other passionate individuals to join us in spotlighting the vast amount of Asian-American/Asian talent out there. If this is something you think you’d be interested in, read on to see how you can help.

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