Yes, it's that time of year again to indulge in some blatant self-congratulating... I mean, have a review of the year's progress towards our goals.

Content

Which means that year on year activity looks like:

(We also scanned an additional 120 broadcast audio issues for a separate archive.)

At the time of writing 130 issues remain in the outstanding scan pile.

Publications

We added International Musician, One Two Testing, Making Music, The Mix and Micro Music to the list of publications we are republishing here (thanks to Tony Horkins, Tony Bacon, Paul Colbert, Brian Giddings and Adrian Walker, Chris Kempter and Darrin Williamson).

This means now that all of the publications in our initial remit we have gained various permissions and consent to archive - that's a big milestone! All publications are now in the publishing rotation, as we continue to work from the earliest issues going forward in half-yearly batches.

We also just completed collections of Micro Music, The Mix, and One Two Testing, thanks to Colin Potter for generously donating his collection to us.

Traffic

Just this week we hit a traffic milestone of half a million page views since launch.

So we have a nice continuous growth, both in search traffic, and because more people are finding us from backlinks, word of mouth and social media. For more on that big spike in traffic, see below.

Top Articles

(All time top 10, by views, in reverse order)

10: Techno Rythim (Derrick May) (MT 1990)

At number 10 we have a great interview with Derrick May on the state of dance music, which many people, both at the time, and when shared on Facebook, found particularly inspirational. Worth a read!

9: Tascam MM1 (MT, 1989)

I honestly have no idea why this rackmount mixer review was so popular!

8: Roland A50 & A80 (MT 1989()

Good to see my favourite MIDI master keyboards score so highly in our All Time Top 10.

7: JBL 4208 Near Field Monitors

Monitors remain a highly popular category, and here we have an entry from JBL, with a speaker styling that I was none too fond of.

6: John Foxx: Recording in Mysterious Ways (SOS 1985)

There's quite some active John Foxx groups on Facebook that were pleased to see this interview from the early days of SOS.

5: The New Standard (Akai S1000) (SOS 1988)

Sound On Sound wrote a super-nice article about mu:zines on their Facebook page, and linked to this article as a jumping off point for people to explore.

This was responsible for a massive spike in our stats, and helped a lot of new people discover the site, with some really nice comments.

4: B&W DM110/DM220 (HSR 1984)

Monitors again, with a typically technical-detail-heavy review by Ben Duncan.

3: Roland D-50 (Part 1) (SOS 1987)
Up from #7 last year

I wrote this in last year's blog post:
"The ever popular D-50 crops up with strong traffic, and high interest due in part no doubt to the lack (still) of a Korg Legacy-style plugin version - though that might be about to change..."

...and change it did, Roland did indeed bring out a (very nice) plugin version.

(I swiftly reverse engineered the plugin file format, and wrote a conversion tool so I could import the hundreds of D50 sysex banks available into it. Since making it available, over 11,000 banks have been converted...)

2: B&W Rock Solid Monitors (RM 1992)

More monitors - this time some little desktop speakers from B&W.

1: Tannoy DC200 Monitors (HSR 1987)

And still holding onto the top spot this year, it's the DC200s! I wonder whether something else will claim the #1 next year, or are the DC200s going to dig in for the long haul..?

Net Notes

We *finally* broke the 200 Twitter followers mark (we seemed to be wavering around the 192 mark *forever*), and it's been really great to see that many of people featured in these magazines are finding and following us, and sharing these articles in their own circles. We've really been proving the value of our archive this year.

We also moved to a new Web Host, which should have been mostly invisible to site users. The new host is UK-based, has much better performance, is cheaper, is more flexible in terms of disk space and bandwidth (the old host was forcing us up onto higher, more expensive tiers to get more disk space), has newer platform software that lets us make some desirable improvements that we couldn't do before, has friendlier, faster support... it's just been a win all round, really.

And as it's less expensive, it will help our monetary donations go further. If you didn't know we needed those, and that you can help us work on this archive, you can read more, and help us, here...

Site Improvements

Despite trying to be more content focused this year, I did manage to do a lot of smaller fixes and improvements to the site, and some of the more noticeable ones include:

- Multiple Artists on articles (required for a small handful of articles)
- Quotes on home page
- Redesigned main Publications list, with display stats/sort order options
- Editor & admin notes on the Issues list page
- Audio player (primarily for the ES&CM cassettes, which I indexed and catalogued and can be played from the ES&CM pages for each issue)
- Article grouping (primarily for content such as the Roland Newslink pullouts)

...and

- Ad tagging

Adverts

Earlier in the year I built an ad tagging feature, so that adverts in each magazine can get tagged wth Gear tags (eg, "This is a Yamaha DX7 ad", and/or vendor tags "Soho Soundhouse", "ABC Music" etc. I ad tag all issues published, but until now they had not been exposed on the site.

Tags will show up underneath the page scans (where the page is not part of an article, otherwise the article name is displayed instead), but more importantly you can filter and search ads just like you can for Gear.

Flipping the gear seach to "Search Advertisements Only" means you can now do things like "Show me all Sampler ads from the 90s", or "Show me Yamaha Drum Machine ads from Sound On Sound", or "Show me all ads for 'The Keyboard Shop'."

Head on over to the "Gear / Ads" page to try it out.

So, that's a wrap for year two...