AbsolutePunk

» see absolutepunk.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

around 2003 my forum signature was a list of hardware. the motherboard and how much ram, on a turkish board where that was the normal way to introduce yourself to a room full of strangers. the american version of the same habit was a music forum, where the signature was a list of bands instead. absolutepunk was the biggest room of that kind on the english-speaking internet, and none of it reached me.

jason tate put the site up on 6 june 2000. he was fifteen and it was a fan page for blink-182 and mxpx, written in whatever he had taught himself. the code he wrote at fifteen was still underneath the thing when it closed almost sixteen years later, which he said out loud at the end. that is a more honest epitaph than most websites get.

the format was a front page of short news posts with a comment thread bolted to each one. a record got a release date or a band put a demo online, and within the hour there was a post about it and forty people arguing underneath. by 2005 the site was doing something like six million hits a day. in 2006 the press was describing it as the thing keeping american teenagers off myspace for a couple of hours a night.

the membership figure depends on who you ask. wikipedia puts it past five hundred thousand and the people who ran it have used three hundred thousand in interviews, and both numbers are enormous for a website about one genre of guitar music. in 2007 blender magazine listed tate at number eighteen among the most influential people in online music, which is a strange sentence to write about one person running a forum by himself.

~ the record ~

~ the front page ~

by the end it held over fifty-five thousand news posts and around two and a half thousand reviews. behind those sat five hundred interviews and a media gallery of fifty-two thousand files, most of it uploaded by readers over sixteen years.

the thing it actually did, which is harder than the numbers make it look, was function as a release calendar for a scene that did not have one. labels announced things unevenly and radio was useless for this music. absolutepunk sat in the middle and told you what was coming, which meant a band could be broken on it before anybody outside the forum had heard the name. fall out boy is the example everybody reaches for.

it also raised about sixteen thousand four hundred dollars for the leukemia research foundation selling wristbands, which is the kind of detail that tells you what the place was actually like from the inside.

~ who owned it ~

buzznet bought absolutepunk in may 2008. buzznet became buzzmedia and then spinmedia, and the company spent the following years assembling a portfolio of scene properties, purevolume among them, on the theory that the audience for one was the audience for all of them.

the theory was not wrong and the timing was terrible. the money in music blogs was already draining toward social platforms that did the same job for free. spinmedia ran into serious financial trouble, and somewhere in that wreckage tate managed to buy back the domain and the name he had registered when he was fifteen.

~ the first of april ~

the announcement went up on 31 march 2016. the site closed the next day and every url, every social account, pointed at chorus.fm instead.

tate gave two reasons and both were true. the software underneath was sixteen years of accumulated patches on top of code written by a teenager, and it could not be fixed without being replaced. the other reason was the name. the people still posting were in their thirties and the word punk in the address had stopped describing either the music or the readership some years earlier.

ten years on, absolutepunk.net still answers. it hands back a redirect to chorus.fm with a query string on the end so the owner can count how many people are still typing the old address. somebody is.

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