Hello, out there!
Thank you for consuming the inaugural communication from the Ybor City Records Dispatch - YCR Dispatch for short - a forum dedicated to the appreciation of, commentary on, and discovery of music. Stretching from the Tampa Bay area to the greater United States, North America, and the broader civilized world.
While this digital publication of sorts will be dedicated to showcasing Ybor City Records artists and songwriters–– and Ybor City Records productions, like the award winning Song Divers podcast–– we will also be covering the naturally-occurring cascade of topics that comes from delving into musicians and artists that are near and dear to our hearts. For example: the art of songwriting, the beauty and appreciation of instruments (need any guest writers, Fretboard Journal?), the communities born from shared musical experiences, the different avenues through which we engage with music, and more.
Ybor City Records proudly calls the Tampa Bay Area of Florida home, but like our Tampa-born distributor, Symphonic Distribution, we don’t consider ourselves a local operation.
We are a TEAM that is proud to export Tampa BAY to the world.
Not all of our artists and topics are Tampa-based, but they have some thread that ties them to our home. It might even just be that a member of our team experienced something here that inspired an article. If it’s engaging and adds to our overall objective of providing you interesting musical stories, then it’s fair game. Again, this is our guided journey, and we hope you enjoy tagging along.
At the least, we hope to present a uniquely-curated range of musicians, topics, and perspectives that inspire our readers and flatter our featured artists.
At most, we hope to be reliably original, competent, empathetic, and sincere. We’ll try to strike a balance between keeping it light and keeping it real. We’ll attempt to keep it fresh while honoring the history, traditions, and craftsmen (and craftswomen and craftspeople) before us— be it their musicianship, songwriting, producing, engineering, or something else that moves us.
We aspire to be as reputable as some of our favorite music and culture outlets — like Tampa Bay’s Creative Loafing, run by Ray Roa, activist and Editor & Chief–– but we are not posing as non-bias or as a news source. We are neither, and we are clear on where we stand. We believe in a woman’s right to choose, that Black Lives Matter, and that facts matter. Hate and racism have no place on our forum, and we do not compromise on those fundamentals. Non-negotiable human rights aside, we do believe in being open minded and trying to reach across the proverbial aisle.
In that spirit, we hope you find some commonality with us/friends/family/strangers through our deliberations and appreciations of the musical culture. After all, music is a universal language. It transcends borders and time. It conveys emotions and ideas that words cannot. It brings us closer to ourselves, and it can bring us closer as a community. If we can bring joy to even a single reader, that’s still a step that we’ll happily take.
Thank you, again, for being here.
We look forward to seeing you out there. On the stage, in the audience, or side-by-side with us listening to that good noise and fighting the good fight.
-STEF
Stefan Scheuermann
LABEL FOUNDER///EDITOR & CHIEF
