Well, I’ll be damned. The RMR zine just proudly stepped across the threshold of one thousand music reviews. And this count doesn’t even include the plethora of lists, editorials, opinions, and other musings that saw the light of day over time.
Frankly, the crew here never thought this would be possible one day. After all, unceremoniously treading on bands’ artistic freedom remains a side hustle at best with a day job and life challenges in full swing. But there is a demand for all that free marketing RMR threw at the audience over time. So, here we go, feistier than ever and never tiring to discover new music every day of every week.
RockmusicRaider timidly started operations in the midst of summer 2014. Frankly, nobody had any idea how to run a website, write some decent recensions, or get into the good graces of the likes of Google. So, it was a long and brutal learning curve in an adversarial environment. One plagued with hefty competition1 and arbitrary actions instigated by the mighty masters of the algorithms running the mysterious web. And this led to a number of changes of venue and violent turbulences leading well into 2015, until the zine – finally – found some real stability. But we got there eventually. Incidentally, our first review was Within Temptation‘s Hydra – and this record didn’t sit well with RMR then and still doesn’t today. And the 1000th write-up fell on Hell:On‘s excellent Shaman. From light Symphonic Metal to brutal Blackened Death Metal. What a journey, indeed.
But let’s not mince words. 1K reviews are the fruit of countless hours of unpaid hard labor in close quarters for many moons. Over 800K words wasted on imaginary oceans of ink and pallet loads of pristine paper. Luckily, we’re all equipped with electronic writing tools or the guardians of forest control would be all over us.
Over time, RMR featured 644 bands in 46 countries over 76 main genres of rock, metal, and folk. The webzine garnered the support of 258 labels, apart from a fair number of self-released records that bands independently pushed on our review pipe. And that amidst an ever-growing readership and an often lively dialogue with all sorts of actors behind the scenes.
So, what’s next? RMR could of course start monetizing this zine a bit better.2 Spiffing up this gaggle of badly written content with snazzier colors and whatnot. But – we quite like it the way it is today. So, we’ll simply continue to work on our second thousand, dishing out opinionated judgment on records of unsuspecting bands. And they keep on coming in by the hundreds every day. So, let’s have at it.
And do check back often. A full review pipe awaits and there are new releases always just around the corner.
The Odd Footnote!