Blistering

» see blistering.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Robert Cotter founded Blistering in 1998, at a moment he later described by saying the web was very different in 97 and 98 and he saw a chance to help push the music industry forward. What that meant in practice was an online magazine for heavy metal and hard rock, run out of the United States, free to read, with no registration and no print edition to protect.

The timing was the whole opportunity. Metal in the late nineties was covered by a handful of print magazines with long lead times and by almost no radio, and the bands underneath the top tier were effectively uncovered. A website had no page count, no printing schedule and no advertiser who would object to a review of a band on a label nobody had heard of. Blistering ran reviews, interviews, features and photography at a volume the print press could not match.

It worked well enough that mainstream papers started quoting it. The Chicago Sun-Times cited Blistering on the nu-metal question in 2001, the Washington Times used it in 2004 on metal's commercial staying power, and the Post and Courier in Charleston quoted it on Clutch in 2009. Blabbermouth, which was the genre's wire service, sourced from it. For a site run by people who came in from outside publishing, that is the recognition worth having.

~ the dossier ~

~ fifteen years of it ~

David E. Gehlke was the editor-in-chief, an American music journalist who had also written for About.com and Metal Maniacs. When the end was announced he put the achievement in the plainest available terms: Blistering.com had remained a viable entity for over fifteen years, and that was what he was most proud of. Fifteen years is a very long run for a free music site with no parent company and no subscription wall, and the number of contemporaries that made it that far is small.

My metal in the early 2000s arrived as mp3 files in an internet cafe in Ankara, named by whoever had ripped them, with nothing written attached. Blistering was the other half of that transaction and I never saw it. Somebody in the United States was reading eight hundred words on the same album I was listening to with the artist tag spelled wrong, and the English-language critical apparatus around the music simply did not travel with the files.

~ the pivot ~

On 25 January 2013 Blabbermouth ran the announcement that Blistering.com would close and be replaced by Blistering Rich Media, a business-to-business operation selling interactive multimedia banner advertising to record labels, artists and entertainment companies. The magazine had served hundreds of thousands of metal fans and published tens of thousands of reviews, features and photographs. The thing that survived it sold banner ads to the industry the magazine had been covering.

blistering.com still answers today. What it serves is a placeholder page whose title reads "Blistering is under construction", which has now been true for considerably longer than the magazine took to build in the first place.

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