Cokemachineglow

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

~ the obit ~

cokemachineglow sat inside a slice of the internet i mostly read but did not participate in. in 2005 i was 21 in ankara, downloading discographies off soulseek and reading pitchfork in a browser tab. cokemachineglow was one of the sites pitchfork linked out to often enough that i knew the name. the writing was long and dense in a way most music blogs were not. i did not comment or follow the masthead. i read the reviews and moved on.

the site launched in 2002 out of canada as a group project by a set of young music writers, with scott reid taking on the founding role. it was one of the first wave of indie-music sites that appeared alongside pitchfork, tiny mix tapes, stylus and drowned in sound. the format on the surface was standard for the era: album reviews with letter grades and scattered essays around them.

what set it apart, honestly, was the editorial formats. cokemachineglow ran counterpoint reviews where a second writer would push back on the first writer's score in the same post. it ran collaborations where three or four writers layered comments over a single record to build a group reading. by 2006 the washington city paper had called it one of the most influential music blogs going. the masthead cycled through more than fifty contributors across the thirteen-year run.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it ended ~

the music-blog category itself started dissolving around 2010. mp3 blogs got hit by dmca takedowns. album-review blogs got outrun by streaming and playlist culture. most of cokemachineglow's peer sites folded between 2010 and 2013. stylus had already gone in 2007. tiny mix tapes hung on longer but shrank. cokemachineglow kept publishing through the whole run and out the other side.

the actual close came at the end of december 2015 with a long farewell post. the archive stayed up. no acquisition, no lawsuit, no server crash. the site had run for thirteen years on nights-and-weekends labor from writers who were also doing other things for a living. by 2015 the world that would have supported paying them for a review had largely stopped existing.

~ what got buried with it ~

cokemachineglow was one of the last active sites of a specific mid-2000s form of music writing. the length of the reviews and the willingness to argue with a colleague in public went out with the site. what replaced it was the tweet-length take and the ranked spotify playlist.

in 2022 an anthology titled cokemachineglow: writing around music 2005-2015 came out through archway editions. it collected a large chunk of the site's best writing. the domain cokemachineglow.com still resolves to the archive as of 2026.

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