HAPPY 16TH BIRTHDAY TO US!

(written by Islander)

For another year, our 16th overall, we’ve raced through the ongoing firestorms of heavy new music without being thrown off and trampled, and so it’s time to celebrate survival again.

On November 21, 2009, I made the first post at this blog (other than a 2-line placeholder thing on November 12th). On the 21st day of every November since then (except one year when I forgot to do it until a few days later) I’ve made a post commemorating our birthday. (If you’re curious to see how everything started, and what our starting goals and principles were, find that first post in 2009 here.)

In these annual posts I used to explain how I had no ambitions or expectations when I started the blog, nor any training or experience as a music writer, and that the sum total of my motivation was to create an enjoyable diversion for myself from the grind of daily life, and to indulge my burgeoning interest in heavy music. And there, I just did it again, albeit in fewer words than in some earlier years.

In these annual observances I also tended to reminisce about how many things about NCS have changed from the early days, and about how surprising it is to me that we’re still here. Some of you remember the early days, because you were here with us then. Others who have begun checking in here more recently might yawn if I indulged in that kind of nostalgia, so once again I’m going to skip that and get right into expressions of gratitude and the annual tradition of mind-numbing statistics.

As for why we’re still here, still hanging on, and why our audience has grown, the most important reason (still) is that I was eventually joined by a group of other writers who seemed to care about the music as much or more than I did, and who completely bought into the guiding principles that I had adopted in starting NCS.

The most important of those principles was that we would spend our time recommending music we believed in and would simply ignore the music that we didn’t like or that we thought wasn’t very good. I don’t imply that there’s anything wrong with reviewers who tell readers why an album is bad; I just never wanted to spend my time doing that. It’s also worth noting that this principle doesn’t prelude our writers from pointing out flaws, as long as overall they want to recommend a release.

Another guiding principle was that we’d never try to make money off this in any way or accept money from anyone for anything — the necessary corollary of which is that no one who writes here gets paid! I thought that would promote honesty and require passion (and I still think that), but at the outset I also thought the idea of this obscure frolic developing into a business would be absurd, because who would ever notice us?

But who are the men behind the madness?

Many writers have drifted in and out of our cadre over these 16 years, some of whom have gone on to write for other publications or to focus on family and careers, and have remained good friends. A few hardy souls have hung in there almost as long as I have, and have become particularly close friends. And so, as usual, I’ll call them out to take a bow.

Andy Synn’s first post was a review of Dimmu Borgir’s Abrahadabra on September 23, 2010. And DGR’s first post was a series of year-end lists on December 28, 2011. They are very fine people, and for me, my friendship with them and with others who eventually joined our ranks has become the most important blessing to me of all for having done this. Their steadfastness in continuing to write for NCS without pay and despite being buffeted by the usual vicissitudes of life over so many years is something I greatly admire, and for which I’m again enormously thankful.

(Speaking of life changes, Mr. Synn got married in September, and it was a joy to be there in Nottingham along with DGR and some other good friends from Seattle.)

As I look back over the last year, thanks are also in order for the contributions of many other fine folks who have also been helping us for a long time:

• Comrade Aleks
• Wil Cifer
• Todd Manning
• Gonzo
• Neill Jameson
• Daniel Barkasi

We also continue to benefit from the contributions of somewhat newer arrivals (and some returning names), including:

• Didrik Mešiček (Slovenia)
• Vizzah Harri (formerly in Vietnam, now back in South Africa)
• Zoltar (France)
• Chile (Norway)
• Ben Manzella (U.S.)
• Tør (formerly U.S., now Australia)

Another big reason why we’re still here is you, and others like you — people who find some value in our recommendations, people who enjoy the writing, and/or people who actually seem to care what we think about the releases that continue coming in a flood every week.

Even though we make no effort to make any money from NCS, I doubt any of us would have continued to do this if no one cared or paid attention or gave us any feedback. It’s a lot of work, and all of us might have concluded that it’s time better spent in other ways if we were just yelling into a great void (like so many of the bands we cover).

Of course, we’re also still here because a still-increasing stream of bands, labels, and publicists exhort us to give their music a shot, and because we still get a lot of joy from the process of exploring new music, and a lot of satisfaction out of helping spread the word about what we find that gets us excited.

And now for the annual round-up of boring statistics!

Since we launched NCS 16 years ago, we’ve published 16,903 posts, including this one — and 896 of those have appeared in the 12 months since our last birthday, which is 34 more than the year before and averages out to 2.45 posts per day, including weekends.

At this writing, we’ve received 87,434 comments since NCS began on this day in 2009, not counting spam and not counting the very, very few we’ve deleted because their toxicity or snarkiness exceeded even our usual hands-off attitude about comments. I still don’t reply to comments as often as I used to, but I read every one of them, and continue to be grateful for the insights, the recommendations, the humor, and the support — and for the fact that our commenters have almost always been civil to us and to each other.

And now I’ll turn to what Google Analytics data tells us about how many people have visited us over the last year, where they’re located by country, total page views, and how all that compares to data from the year before. Some of this data still doesn’t make complete sense to me because it’s mainly geared to people who are running a business — which we aren’t — and because the terminology keeps changing in ways I can’t be bothered to figure out.

With those caveats, a report I viewed yesterday shows that we received 1,089,144  page views over the last 12 months, which is 70,882 more than we received in the previous year; an “event count” of 2,933,734, which is about 200,000 more than the year before (an “event count” appears to measure not only page views but any other user interaction with the site, like clicking on links or activating music streams); and 369,677 “active users” over the year, compared to 280,077 from the year before.

Google Analytics states that it excludes from the foregoing data any traffic from “known bots and spiders”, though it’s possible some bot traffic makes its way into the data. I also pay for a firewall security service that blocks malware and bots. That makes the next part of this data recap confusing.

In most past years the demographic data provided by Google Analytics has shown that roughly 40-45% of our active users live in the U.S., with a significant percentage of the balance coming frum the UK, Canada, and Europe. Over the past 12 months, however, the data reports that 35.6% of active users were in the U.S., followed by 10% from China and 7% from Singapore. That’s unexpected, and I’m suspicious, but who knows?

The rest of the top 10 are UK (5%), Canada (3.85%), Germany (3.76%), Russia (2.5%), Australia (2.14%), France (2.09%), and Sweden (1.9%) — with the balance spread across 202 other countries around the world.

We don’t have a widespread social media presence because maintaining and trying to propagate that would require time better spent on what we present at our site. But we do still make Facebook posts alerting people to new articles at NCS. As of yesterday we had 55,459 followers on FB,  an increase of 2,855 from this time last year. That’s kind of surprising, because the “organic reach” of our FB posts is pretty pathetic, since I’m not going to pay Meta to boost the reach. (They want to treat us like a business, but again, we’re not that.) And btw, you can find us on Bluesky now too.

 

As we now begin our glorious 17th year of survival, I’ll once again paraphrase from Blade Runner: I don’t know how long we’ll have together… Who does? I hope we’ll still be here at this time next year to celebrate the end of our 17th year, and I hope you’ll still be here with us. It’s been a hell of a trip so far, and all of us here at NCS are excited about continuing the ride.

Stay safe, and don’t let the bastards get you down.

– Islander