In April our 5th anniversary passed without much notice. To be honest we were so busy behind the scenes here we didn’t even bother to throw a party like we have in the past. But I couldn’t let this milestone pass without doing something. 

When the dot-com fever was running rampant, many pundits equated web-years to dog-years. In a lot of ways that was correct, things just run feverishly on the web timetable. If you have a print publication your deadlines are a bit more spaced out but on the web, you have deadlines daily. It’s a bit more stressful but in the end it’s great for the readers. 

The Internet has opened a lot of doors for people. We can now log on to the net and get instant access to the latest news and information about subjects that interest us, check out new bands and find all kinds of entertainment to occupy our time. In fact, if you have an interest, there is a good chance that there are like-minded webpages out there for you to check out.  If for instance you are like our very own Greenmuse and have a thing for Mullets, then you are just a Google away from more mullets than a stadium hosting a tractor pull can hold. 

To be quite honest five years ago when I started this whole thing rolling I never imaged it would be where it is today with millions of readers and a whole community of music fans that log on to check in with their online friends, get news, reviews and discuss any topic under the sun. 

The original idea was to build a simple website where I’d post some band information, maybe some reviews and news. My musical taste has always fluctuated between the mainstream, classics and bands that fly below the radar. In fact, back in April of 1998 it was that last group that inspired me one day to log onto the Internic website and register the Rocknworld.com domain and start this whole thing rolling.  (the name came from a song by such a band, Enuff Z’nuff). 

My favorite groups at the time were simply not getting coverage anywhere else. I thought here is this tremendous tool of the Internet and still these bands aren’t being heard. So I figured I’d throw up a webpage with info on bands like these and draw people in with coverage of more mainstream bands. So I registered the domain and started working on the site. I told my buddy Brian about my idea and he like me was into a lot of bands that flew under the radar (his scene was punk, while mine was rock). So we began putting the site together. 

At first it was really simple, we both spent a couple hours a week writing about bands we loved and putting together information pages on artists that interested us and throwing in some mainstream stuff along the way. We never thought it would go much beyond that. It was a fun hobby and our way of spreading the news about great music. 

The first week we were online we got a couple thousand hits and we were ecstatic. “Wow,” we thought, “people are checking this thing out.” And as the site grew, the traffic grew.  By the time we hit six months, we were getting well over a million hits a month and this was all from word of mouth and search engines. To this day we never spent a dime on advertising. At that point the site had grown to incorporate more news and reviews and we had a few hundred artist features up. Unfortunately, Brian had things in his own life to take care of and he moved away and we lost touch but I carried on and kept plugging away. 

About a month later I got an email from a music journalist out of San Diego named Debbie Seagle. She liked what we were doing with Rocknworld and wanted to contribute. I told her it was more or less a hobby at that point and what little we were making from advertising on the sites went to pay for the web hosting and over expenses. She didn’t care, she just wanted an outlet to write about bands she loved and the pubs she was writing for at the time only seemed to care about the current “hot bands”. So needless to say Debbie fit right in! 

But it needs to be pointed out that Debbie was the person who helped take things to the next level. Being a professional, she came in and brought us some much needed credibility with the artists and their reps. She used her contacts to help put us on the map so to speak and labels began paying attention when we called to try and line up interviews and reviews.  That was when things really began to take off, by our first anniversary we were getting a hundred thousand hits a day and it had grown beyond simply doing it a couple hours a week. I found myself spending more and more time working on the site, at the expense of my “real” job. 

It was a month after our first anniversary and I went out to a show with a few friends. The band wasn’t that great and while sat in a Norms restaurant after the show joking about how we would review that band, the spark of antiMUSIC ignited. To that point Rocknworld was devoted to “positive” coverage of great music. There are a lot of aspects of the music industry that I detest like watching great bands get screwed over and ignored but Rocknworld’s focus was on telling people about those bands and not necessarily bashing crap artist or the evils of the industry.  But the idea of antiMUSIC sprang forth in that casual conversation. Why not make a new site that mixes a little attitude into the coverage? 

We joked around about names, trust me there were some fun ones like shitmusic.com and bandsthatsuck.com but those were a bit too narrow and would have locked us into a box. I remembered a line in a book I had read a few months previous called “Broken Record” which was a book about the history of the Grammy’s.  The Grammy’s came about as an answer to the onslaught of Rock n Roll. The music establishment at that time hated Rock n Roll, they considered it “anti-music” and started the Grammy Awards as a way to counter the building influence of Rock n Roll in the music industry. No better term could describe what we wanted to do. The irony of the name stuck, we would continue on with the Rocknworld.com idea of promoting great music that the establishment thought of as “anti-music” and also rally against the establishment and “manufactured” music that was destroying the spirit of Rock n Roll (at least in our eyes). 

So in May of 1999 antiMUSIC.com was born. And that site too soon took on a life of it’s own. But it was Debbie who came up with the idea that would help really define both sites and also give them their main personality. 

I was talking to her one day and she said, “Why don’t you put up something on the reviews where the readers can make comments?” It was such a simple idea but to that point if the readers wanted to comment on music they had to do so on the message boards. I thought, ok this will be a fun experiment and we began implementing Fan Speak into our articles and that too soon took on a life of it’s own. From the start the regular readers more or less took over. People began logging on to check out the comments that went along with the articles and regular readers began to get to know each other through their Fan Speak postings. Pretty soon a visible community of fans grew up around Rocknworld and antiMUSIC.  Most seemed to share our passion for music and disdain for “manufactured” music. 

At that point we had launched RockSearch.com and I wanted to put together a hub that joined all the sites together. Inspired by the readers and their rebellious attitude I took the name of our company the Iconoclast Entertainment Group and mixed it with the word fan to create the iconoFAN moniker. If ever there were a group of iconoclastic fans that gathered together in one place it was on antiMUSIC and Rocknworld! 

As time went by the Internet industry as a whole went through a roller coaster ride. People with dot-coms that were losing money hand over fist were issuing IPO’s and becoming millionaire over night. Investors only needed to hear the word “dot-com” and they threw money at net companies. We were approached a few times about having “money men” invest in our little company and some wanted to buy us outright. When I was offered a couple million dollars to sell out, my head began to spin, “they want to pay $2 million dollars for my little hobby?” I couldn’t believe it but since it was never about the money I turned them down. I didn’t want greed or money to come in and cloud what we were really all about. I didn’t want moneymen to have control over what music we covered and basically wanted to keep our editorial integrity intact. I’ll be honest, part of me wanted to take the money and run but in the end I decided against it. 

It was after our second anniversary that we really began to grow. antiGUY became the dominant personality and force behind antiMUSIC and new writers began to come on board. The rants started to appear on antiMUSIC. We hooked up with one of our readers, an East Coast student and DJ, in May of 2000 and started syndicating the rants he published on his personal website. Yes, I’m talking about good old’ Dr Fever.  His first rant, “Why I hate MTV and People In General” was an instant hit. 

It was a heady time, dot-com fever was running rampant, Napster was battling the music industry and our little corner of the web was growing. But by the end of the year the bubble burst and we woke up to find that other music sites (along with tons of others) were shutting down left and right. Because we never got caught up in the “dot-com” fever we were able to survive, although with the dot-com crash the money we were making from advertising that at that point just barely covered our expenses began to dry up.  But we had a mission. By that point I had quit my day job and was making a living doing consulting and contract work. That gave me more time to focus on the sites, which had become a full time job in itself.  But I’ll be honest, all through 2001 and 2002 it looked like we might have to close down ourselves as ad revenue hit new lows and more and more money had to come out of my own pockets to keep things afloat (and I was running out of cash!). It was a weird paradox, our popularity continued to grow but at the same time ad revenue kept declining. But we kept to our mission and did the best we could. 

In March of 2001 another one of our regular readers came on board as a columnist. Armed with a sharp wit, a colorful imagination, and a fetish for mullets, The Greenmuse became another staple of antiMUSIC.  Other writers came and went over the next couple of years but antiGUY, Dr Fever and Greenmuse became synonymous with antiMUSIC. 

More recently Scott Stapp, Dan Grote and the Hobo have become popular writers here and help bring a little more diversity to the mix with their unique styles and tastes. 

Now I look back at what has happened over the past five years and how that little inspiration I had one afternoon has played out. It amazes me still of what that little germ of an idea has grown into. Sure we’re still a small company and our writers do it for love of the music but the readers latched on along the way and really gave us our identity and helped keep the focus. But now there a few million more readers than in the beginning and antiMUSIC more than any of the other sites has become known in the online world for that focus on substance over hype and also for the original intention behind Rocknworld, exposing people to great music. Of course we’re known for other things like bashing manufactured bands and trends but overall I think the thing that makes it what it has become is the readers, they have put their stamp on the sites and made it all their own. 

Like I said in the beginning, our 5th anniversary went by without even a whisper. Looking back some of our biggest competitors are gone and we’re still here and it’s time to look at where we are going and I’m happy to report we’re still streaming full ahead. I’m sure there will be ups and downs in the months and years to come as the Internet matures but hopefully we’ll be able to continue on the path we have been on, continue to grow and hold our own little special place in cyber space. 

We’ll continue to bring you the latest news, views and reviews. You’ll still be able to log on and post your thoughts on what’s happening in the world of music and elsewhere as well as interested with your antiMUSIC friends. We’ll continue to expand our offerings of “offline” sponsored shows and hopefully continue and grow what began as a three day music festival in LA last November, the antiFEST.  Later this month we will launch our next great experiment, a full length TV show streaming through the web called appropriately enough “The antiSHOW.” 

While our main mission has never changed, other things have. You may have noticed in April (2003) that one change took place; the iconoFAN network became the antiMUSIC network. While, I loved the iconoFAN name and what it represents, I found that more and more people came to associate all of the sites with antiMUSIC and going back to where the name of that site came from, I thought the term used to describe how the music establishment viewed Rock n Roll was perfect for what we are doing here. They still are our there trying to shove the latest trend or manufactured act down our throats but we know what we love and if they want to view it as “antiMUSIC” that is fine, we’ll wear that title as a badge of honor. Because only the good stuff earns that coveted title! 

Thanks you for being a part of this dream and mission and making antiMUSIC what it is today. It’s been a fun ride and I look forward to joining you as we enter the next era of antiMUSIC.  Please don’t forget that it has been and always will be your site. 

Keavin

Thanks for your support on behalf of all of our contributors past and present: Keavin, antiGUY, Debbie Seagle, Brian Aguilar, Dr Fever, Greenmusic, Dan Grote, Linda Speilman, Adam Bielawski, Rob Grabowski, The Hobo, The Freak, Tom Spanks, Holiday, Goth Brooks, Kim George, Phil Dis, PMS Girl and everyone else I may have overlooked!  It's been a wild ride.