Happy Birthday to us! mu:zines is one year old. Still a baby, but we're at least now crawling!

Let's take a whirlwind tour of our first year.

Content

	Pubs Live	Active	Scanned	Owned	Articles	Gear Items	Artists
Launch	5	38	175	248	625	530	156
Now	8	124	519	557	2212	1180	292

Which means that, over the year since launch, we:

• Acquired 309 issues
• Scanned 344 issues
• Completed 86 issues

We also added Intune, Music UK, and Electronic Soundmaker & Computer Musician to the list of publications we are republishing here.

Traffic

We took a deliberately soft launch, and only really mentioned it in a couple of forums - it was an "if you build it, they will come" approach. The year in stats looks like this:

The early big spike in traffic came from this post on Reddit:
> (Reddit) Huge collection of late 80s early 90s uk music mags

You can see we have a nice continual steady growth throughout the year, and are now running with regular traffic at about the same level as that big Reddit spike at the beginning.

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Top Articles

(By views, in reverse order, because... well, drama, or something...)

10: Downstairs At Erics (EMM)

Starting at number 10, Vince Clarke is always a popular figure in the synth world, and this article was bumped up due to Facebook social traffic.

9: Tascam 688 Midistudio (MT)

Somewhat surprising the 688 has had constant traffic since launch - there are some active 688 user groups out there. Good to see cassette recording *is* still going on - I have some nostalgia for recording to cassette. Except I'm not going back. Ever. *shudder*

8: Kawai K4/K4R (MT)

Another one that might be surprising - I would have thought JP8, or CS80 articles would be up here, but the eighth spot is taken by the 4 - the K4.

7: Roland D-50 (SOS) Part 1

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 of course, Eric Persing's masterly sound design.

6: Go West Producer: Gary Stevenson (SOS)

This was a great article for me - I first read it when the SOS issue in question was donated (thanks Bill!). I still think the Go West production of that era is stellar, and I always loved in particular the synth work on "We Close Our Eyes", so it was great to find out how it was done, and do my own recreations.

There's a really nice YouTube video of Gary doing a tour of his studio that's worth checking out (which I'll leave as an exercise for the reader!)

5: The Sound-Painted World of Harold Budd (SOS)

Much of the traffic here came from Facebook, where there is a lot of interest in Harold Budd. We have a few interviews we him on mu:zines, but this is the one that got shared around a lot.

4: Korg T1 (MT)

Another surprising one - an absolute beast of a synth and in many ways the pinnacle of the M1-era Korg. Again, no social traffic as such, just a continual flow of traffic checking this one out.

I remember they had one bolted to the wall above the stairs in a popular Denmark Street music shop for some time. Goodness knows how they managed to get it (and keep it) up there!

3: Geoff Downes (SOS)

Your synth nerd's synth nerd, Geoff Downes, with his stupendous collection of, like, every synth, ever. I'm not jealous. At all... Again, lots of Facebook referrals.

2: Love's Great Adventure (Ultravox) (EMM)

Various Ultravox and Midge Ure fan sites and Facebook pages shared this article around in the last few months, and it's rocketed up from nowhere to the number two spot.

And, the top spot is taken by...

1: Tannoy DC200 (HSR)

Ever since this article went up, there has been a constant, regular source of traffic here, with no social activity at all. People must still be using a lot of these speakers. Or maybe they're all looking up what drivers they need to buy to replace their old broken ones? Who knows? I can't explain the traffic, merely report on it...! :)

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Feedback & Contributions

Hey - our finances got into the black (well, green!). Thank you so much to everyone who generously donated funds.

We broke the "magic 100 number" with 103 Twitter followers gained, but we don't do Facebook, despite a certain amount of traffic and discussion originating there.

Site Improvements

In addition to all the content effort, we made a lot of site improvements since launch, including better image handling, relations and role tagging for people ("show me all the guitarist interviews" etc), some visual overhauls and improvements, and lots of other small things.

We have more improvements in the works, and there are still some areas that need to be improved, but we'll hopefully summarise those in our birthday blog next year! ;)

Thank you to everyone who has helped out, sent nice feedback, and bigged us up on various forums! It looks like you're enjoying what we're doing.