The TP magazines & books have been one of the major inspirations to me in forming my own musical encyclopedic brain. Growing up stuck in an AM (later FM) world of crap pop/top 40, TP was a cultural watershed & definitely led my mail-order purchases and distance musical shopping trips. My dog-eared 1st ed. is a testament proudly reflected in my vinyl collection.
I know it's difficult if not impossible for a publication to keep up with musical events (I mean even TP was to be left behind as late 80s & early 90s "alternative" exploded into the various rock hybrids of jazz, folk, electronic, World, dance, etc - where are the Mo'wax, Ninja Tune, K7 bands? where are artists like Cetano or Moreno Veloso, Bebel Gilberto, Shuggie Otis? or even bread & butter TP bands like "!!!", Radio 4, Pg 99, To Rococo Rot, Belle & Sebastian...obviously no one can do it all, but TP has done a brilliant job over time and without it's influence, I would have never found these missing bands myself either.
So comes my point - I know it's probably a financial impossibility to see a 6th edition in print, but what are the chances of a web-based, downloadable archive. A good example similar to TP is the CIA World Factbook: [
www.cia.gov]
You can download essentially the entire site/factbook for offline reference. Since TP isn't advertising driven, I don't really see the point of forcing people online. I would love to have my hyperlinked TP to be portible as well and I would be willing to pay a subscription for that, knowing perhaps every 6 months/year I could download an update. Hopefully the potential revenue streams would also encourage more updates...
what are others' opinions?