culture
CHARTattack Is Back With a New Indie Arsenal
The once-defunct music site's new owners and editor-in-chief are prepping it to rejoin the ranks of Toronto's indie music media.
It was a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory kind of moment: quiet since late July this past summer, one of Toronto’s most pre-eminent music websites CHARTattack suddenly announced it was back online and started churning out magical nuggets of delicious music news and samples on Monday. Only instead of a wiry top-hatted man with a cane and a legion of orange minions hard at work, it’s run by the guys of entertainment and tech site andPOP.
Well, one of them in particular—Dan Busheikin, CHARTattack‘s new editor-in-chief. He says he knows little about the deal between andPOP‘s CEO Rob Ostfield and CHARTattack‘s founders, Edward Skira and Nada Laskovski, only that Ostfield and his team thought “maybe a fresh perspective and some new blood might bring [the website] back.”
Right now, though, he’s the one posting and resuscitating the site as he builds a staff of writers and contributors and answers questions about its operation. But as the mastermind behind Side B, an indie and alternative music multimedia offshoot site of andPOP, he says CHARTattack will be a natural extension of his duties there.
“I definitely want to keep the focus on independent and alternative music,” he says. “One of the reasons I personally lost interest in CHARTattack was when the focus became a bit more broad, became just The Edge or something like that.”
So even though it’s now under the andPOP family, which focuses on mainstream and top 40 artists, the two publications will have little in common editorially other than an inconsistent use of capitalization—one only needs to look at the most recent blurbs about Phoenix, Justice, The Weeknd, M83, and Mikey Welsh to get a feel for the future direction of CHARTattack.
“I’m really going to try my best to find that middle ground, so we’re not just promoting everything on the radio or that’s on a label, but also without excluding people who don’t want to stick their noses into something too niche,” he says.
“Don’t judge,” he laughs, when we ask him who’s behind the editorial choices. An interesting reaction from a guy who clearly knows the site is now under the microscope of Toronto music fans and writers, with some thrilled and some not about its resurrection. So far, he’s touched, even inspired, by the support for the CHARTattack name but knows that won’t last forever.
“I’m looking forward to seeing feedback about the changes we have coming, but you can’t please everybody,” he says. “I have seen responses like ‘CHARTattack’s crap anyway—who cares?’ and that actually excites me more. I want to restore it. It has a legacy, but it’s a mixed legacy. People love it for what it represented but at the same time not a lot of people were reading it, and I believe that’s a bit of a failure on the side of the website.”
Busheikin also hopes for CHARTattack to become more multimedia, in the vein of andPOP and B Side.
“I’d love for CHARTattack to become a destination for people to discover artists through video or watch a beautiful video of a performance by their favourite artist,” he says. “But ultimately I’m concerned with putting up great content, letting people hear about good music, be entertained, not be threatened with anything too elitist.”
It doesn’t sound as if there are plans to turn CHARTattack upside down and inside out, which should appease its supporters, but the changes in editorial should also bring back music fans with sharper tastes who may have strayed from CA, causing it to die out. In any case, to Busheikin, it’s the fact that Torontonians still have an opinion about it that gives it hope for a second life.
“We’re all [at andPOP] really excited about having a new outlet, and I‘m really grateful. With all the music blogs out there, CHARTattack is special, and I think people really know that,” he says. “Even though people think it slipped, or it was never good, or that it was always amazing, its still has a legacy. And we’re really thrilled to be the ones trying to preserve that.”