You may remember last year that we managed to achieve 185th place in the people’s choice awards at the BT Digital Music Awards. That was a fantastic achievement in itself (because we had no idea who had nominated us or what they were), and this year we’re going to try and go at least 150 better.

Click the image below to vote for us (you’ll also see it on the right-hand side until voting closes in September) and we’ll be eternally grateful.

If you think of yourself as a like-minded person - and can string a sentence or three together in English - then we’d love to hear from you. Unfortunately we don’t pay writers for any contributions, TMM being run solely for the love of the game rather than for profit, but you will get to keep anything we ask you to review. You’ll also get the chance to attend gigs and listen to some of the biggest releases before the general public. Plus you’ll always get credited for anything you submit.

Because we like lists, we’ll give you a breakdown of the criteria we’re looking for:

- Good writing style.
- Excellent command of the English language.
- A love of all music.
- The time to contribute a couple of reviews a month.

If all that sounds good, then drop us an e-mail at jobs@themusicmagazine.co.uk. We don’t expect all applicants to have been published, however we do ask that you attach at least one example of your work. This doesn’t have to have appeared anywhere, but does have to have been written in the past three months. After that, if we’re interested we’ll be in touch. Unfortunately we can’t reply to everyone, but we do try our best.

We’ve implemented quite a few little touches that you should see on your travels, and fixed features on the previous site that didn’t quite work as well as we’d hoped - such as the ‘print this page’ and ‘e-mail this page’ features. They’re not dramatic changes, but they actually work this time round!

We’ve had to add a new forum as well, which will be open soon. It’s been designed to run alongside the site so your logins will work. We’ve also integrated OpenID so that anyone with one of those accounts should be able to post comments on articles - it won’t work with the forums though I’m afraid.

Moving on, we’re planning to use more multimedia too. On the live reviews that we sneak a photographer into we’ll be posting galleries of snapshots taken at the gig in a handy Javascript design. It’s something we didn’t have before, so we’re excited at the possibilities.

To start proceedings then, have a listen to Muse and Mike Skinner - they recorded a rough demo of a song called ‘Who Knows Who’ a short while ago and it’s doing the rounds online.