Creed Taylor Produced

I’ve finally sat down and found time to make a number of much-needed updates and changes to the website that hosts ctproduced.com – It’s been a long time coming. This is mostly because my technical skills have completely atrophied over the past 10 years, and I know how much time it takes to get going again.

It’s been worth it, though. There have been over 1.3 million impressions, 100,000 page hits, and there are some 1,260 subscribers. Thank you for reading and subscribing.

Categories, Tags – Labels, Artists and Topics.

Things that have changed. The traditional categories, used here to track posts on labels like CTI, KUDU, and VERVE, have been removed from individual post pages. This removes them as a source of results when you search. For example, all posts that directly deal with CTI recordings are > https://ctproduced.com/category/cti/.

The same is true for WordPress post tags. These are used here for Musicians, Staff, and People. For example, all posts dealing with Freddie Hubbard are https://ctproduced.com/tag/freddie-hubbard/.

These were previously listed on each and every post and page, meaning effectively any person I’ve written about could be found on every page. Not much use. They are still included on the main/home page for the site, but that is all.

If you are looking for specific label, artist, or person information, I’ve added a new page which contains the same label categories and artist tag clouds, as well as a custom Google-based search of the site. The site search will also return results from Doug Payne’s website, which still remains a favorite of mine. The advanced search page is below. It also has direct links to the artist and people pages. You can also find a link on every page as a submenu on the “About ctproduced” menu at the top of each post and page.

RSS Feed

The site RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed ^[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS has been stop/start for a long time. I’m happy to say this is fixed now. If you’d like to read updates to ctproduced as they are posted or keep them separate from your email, you just need to add the RSS feed to your RSS Reader. I use Thunderbird for email and have an RSS feed folder that works great. Like almost any public website running WordPress, the RSS Feed is https://ctproduced.com/feed

For those of you who know the difference, or just prefer ATOM ^[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(web_standard) , ctproduced.com also has an ATOM feed. https://ctproduced.com/feed/atom/

Subscription

I’ve made the ability to subscribe more obvious. There is a subscription box at the bottom of every page and a floating “Subscribe” link at the bottom right as well.

I have absolutely no plans to move to a paid platform like Substack. I write ctproduced as a hobby and to share music I love. You can’t put a price on love. However, by subscribing, I can see how people react and are interested in the topics I’m writing about. I can see on a single report the page hit counts, the dates, and the number of subscribers.

So, go ahead and subscribe.

MIXCLOUD

It’s hard to believe now, but I originally started ctproduced.com with the idea that it would give me a place to write about mixes of Creed Taylor produced artists and tracks, around themes. Back in those days Mixcloud hosting was free. For views and “reach” Youtube was always better.I decided to stick to using Youtube for videos, rather than music – I soon experienced two strikes and the videos were taken down.

I appealed, one was simply a video of some extracts and mixes of a Kenyon Hopkins/Creed Taylor orchestra tracks – that was taken down as it was a violation of Community Guidelines as the video was judged a scam or deceptive. Except it was literally a picture of the album cover and edits of tracks from the album. The appeal was upheld and I was not even able to explain what it was or where it came from. Frankly that killed my enthusiasm for Youtube.

Around the same time, Mixcloud moved to a pro/paid model for uploads. I already pay a lot for software and hosting licenses and just decided it wasn’t worth it. In retrospect that was a mistake, I’ve taken out a pro membership this month and have plans to make more use of Mixcloud rather than self hosting.

I should add, that p[aying for a pro license makes sense as Mixcloud actually pays for plays to the owning company and artists, unlike Youtube which pays the video creator for views based on ad revenue.

I’ve already uploaded the Taylor’s Dozen mix, and it joins the others posted years ago.

Look Ahead

For numerous reasons, headed by a requirement for greater use statistics and feedback, I am going to make more use of Subscriber posts this year. The first will likely be for an upcoming George Benson live set. I really want to know what post types and subjects people are interested in.

I also have a lot of past promises to deliver on. For example, I need to finish the audio mix from one of my earliest posts about the first 14 singles Creed Taylor released on the independent CTI label – known here as a Taylor’s Dozen. Then there is the Jack Teagarden video, and I have a whole new program to cover outside of ctproduced.com – The Voices Of Vista – this came from acquiring the Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto shows from the same name – which I also promised to post here.

I currently have around 90 draft posts. Many of these are long-form essays that are either incomplete or have lost their way. While the popularity of a topic will largely be based on what they are about, many are perhaps simply too long.

Finally, at some point later this year, as time allows, I plan to try out different themes and fonts. To be fair, this is influenced by some of the Substack writing I’ve been reading over the last year. Again, this will be to test out readability and get feedback.

One visible result of this will be to start using default font sizes and colors for headings rather than smaller green-on-black headings. If I do decide to change the look and feel, this will make it less work because there are fewer changes to make.

Feel free to leave any comments or critiques below.

UPDATE: April 24th, 2026 7am – added line about Mixcloud paying artists for plays.