……As 2013 marks 10 years since the launch, Mr. Rizik spoke from his home base of Michigan about early goals for soultracks.com, what makes the site different from other entertainment pages and how up-and-coming musicians can increase their chances of getting coverage and respect.

CHRIS RIZIK (CR)- “Ultimately, I did this because it was an itch I had to scratch. I’m such a big music fan and I didn’t see anything else out there that was where I wanted it to be as a reader. I can’t say I had the whole concept developed when I first started, I just knew I wanted to create something to where fans could read about artists that they couldn’t learn about anywhere else. As I came to learn about about all of these new talented independent artists that I wasn’t hearing about on the radio, I wanted to become a voice that would just expose the best of them to music fans and hopefully, create a strong critical voice that would help people find what they were looking for.

One of the really interesting things that we noticed early on was that new recording and distribution techniques helped artists that couldn’t get a major contract still find a way to get their music out there to listeners, but there’s no way for a potential fan to sift through the thousands of artists. What I really hoped we could be is that ‘Good Housekeeping’-type seal of approval for a new artist we really liked and give them a new level of exposure. For readers, we could exist as a kind of a filter to help them sort, from this big haystack of music, the wheat from the chaff.”

KNOWSHI- One of the major differences I noticed when I discovered the site was how it serves as a bridge between the ‘old school’ and ‘the new school.’ How did that particular approach evolve?

CR- “Pretty early on, we realized that most of the people coming to our site had a connection to old school soul, no connection to the newer music coming out now and didn’t really have a way to find it. So part of what we wanted to do was function as a translator: if you liked this, you should listen to that. We wanted to find a way to re-engage fans of old school music and help them to connect to new school music of artists who are amazingly talented, but simply didn’t have the same type of access that the older artists had. Today, the urban division of many major labels are…(click here for the full Chris Rizik interview)