Growing up in and around the Tampa Bay music scene I would hear occasional murmurings about a time in the not-so-distant past when a handfull of local rags championed Tampa Bay's local music community. As I listened to such tales, my teenage imagination would conjure up images of chain smoking, black denim clad musicians hanging out on street corners reading these magazines as stegosauruses grazed behind them and terradactlys circled above their shaggy heads. In other words, music magazines devoted solely to covering the Tampa Bay music scene seemed outmoded and preposterous. Fortunately not everyone in Tampa Bay is as myopic and shortsighted as I tend to be...
Tampa Bay music scene stalwarts Jeannette Goldman (owner of Pro Star Recording Studio), Ken Thomas (webmaster of Tampabaymusicscene.com) and Thomas Garcia (local producer, songwriter and promoter) have banded together to publish Bay Area Beat: a magazine for the local scene and the local scene only.
Here's how their press release describes the mag's mission: "Bay Area Beat is all about promoting LOCAL artists and musicians. Period. No priority coverage for national acts." Here's how Goldman rather emphatically put it to me during a recent phone interview, "We don't care who is playing at the St. Pete Times Forum! We're trying to support the musicians in the area that are working and making a living with their music."
