It’s our tenth birthday! What a journey it’s been. Here are ten things we’ve learnt over the last decade.

Live music is the lifeblood of the scene

The first article we ever wrote was a review of a live event and we haven’t stopped since. Against our better judgement, we attend gigs across the country, write the review and edit the pictures overnight so that the article is live for your commute the following morning. We love the feeling of experiencing the live crowd, the live environment. And at a time when we can’t go to live gigs, we’re missing it all the more.

The UK is awesome

It’s no secret that the Sound Doctrine is a UK based site that prioritises UK music. Yes we cover artists from the States and elsewhere but it’s always from a British perspective. We’re proud of the scene in Blighty and have been blown away by the progress the UK has made over the last ten years.

We love great pics

Here’s a lesson we had to learn the hard way. The way we illustrated some of our articles in our early days left a lot to be desired. We soon learnt we had to bring a camera to the events we attended, ditch the ageing camera phone and forget about that embarrassing picture from our first ever article. We’re over it. OK not really, it still haunts us.

We’ve put up our tent more times than we care to remember

The Big Church Day Out has been a constant feature on the Sound Doctrine. We started the site with a review of the event in 2010 and have been there many times since. We’ve set tents up in the rain, had cold showers, got lost and had to endure horrific thunderstorms. But we’ve also met great people, worshipped with fellow believers, seen many people come to Christ, and seen the best artists in the world so it was all worth it.

Consumption has changed a lot

Remember CDs? They were a thing when we started the Sound Doctrine in 2010. Now we don’t buy music anymore. We don’t buy anything anymore. We pay for the privilege to stream as much as we want. Now, we have stacks of old CDs (and even casettes) with no way to play them but a lot of happy memories about how they used to sound. On a related note, buy gig tickets and artist merch. Man’s gotta eat innit.

Our annual One to Watch lists are always correct…

We’ve done this thing for the last few years where we predict the artists that will blow in the next 12 months. More often than not, we get it right and give you music to look forward to. Whether it’s industry newbies, or gospel stalwarts, we always find it fun to take a punt on what and who we’ll see a lot of over the next year.

…Except for the times when we’re really wrong

We’re no prophets and sometimes we get things wrong. Plans change, schedules go out of the window and some people don’t gain the momentum we predict in January. We don’t lose sleep over it, we drink Horlicks.

Sometimes it’s OK to be controversial

Sometimes the things we write rub people up the wrong way. That could be a simple tweet or a full blown article. We’ll never forget the time we wrote an article about music videos that drew the ire (check the comments section) of one Shabazz Graham (the guy behind that legendary Dwayne Tryumf 777 intro and many others). It turned into a productive real life conversation on Premier Gospel about creativity. We never troll. We 100% believe everything we write. By the way, we wrote a second article on music videos a couple of years later.

Our original name was rubbish

Little known fact. We launched in 2010 but not as the Sound Doctrine. The first few articles on this site were published as part of the Fire Station – a reference to DJ Fireman, the founder of the site. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Thank God we saw sense quickly.

We’re only just getting started

Christian music journalism in the UK has changed immeasurably over the last ten years. We haven’t. Yes, we’ve grown and developed but our love for the music we play has never waned. We’ve proud of going ten years strong but we can’t wait to see what’s around the corner.