Gigwise

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

~ the last words ~

Gigwise is still publishing, and that is the problem. Something at gigwise.com posts several times a week under bylines carrying titles like Senior Vocal Arts Correspondent, and the output runs from a celebrity's height and weight to a piece about online casinos in New Zealand. The masthead over it is twenty five years old. Nothing underneath it is.

The real Gigwise began in Liverpool in 2001, made by Simon Perlaki and Andy D Day, and it started as a page of gig listings. Listings are a good foundation for a music site because they force you to know what is actually happening rather than what a press release claims is about to. It widened out into news and reviews from there and moved down to London. By October 2010 it was pulling more readers than NME.com.

That figure is the one worth keeping. A site started by two people in Liverpool was outdrawing the weekly that had been the British music paper since 1952, and outdrawing the BBC's music pages in the same year, with its copy getting picked up by BBC News and the Guardian afterward. It ran its own arena at a festival in 2011 and handed out a best song award at the BT Digital Music Awards the same summer. Music Week nominated it for best music media brand in 2013.

British music press was never my reading. Some of the bands were, but the apparatus around them was a domestic arrangement that made sense if you were buying a paper from a newsagent on a Wednesday, and from here you got the records without the ecosystem that argued about them. What I recognize in Gigwise is the part with nothing to do with music: a name that outlasted the people who built it and then got put to work by strangers.

~ the record ~

~ the print run nobody expected ~

In 2021 Gigwise started a print magazine. Eight issues came out before it stopped in 2023, which reads as a failure until you consider that a music website launching paper in 2021 was not confused about the market. It was making an argument about what a music publication is for, twenty years after the internet had supposedly settled that question, and the argument was that some writing deserves an object.

The site had been running on the strapline "reporting from beyond the barrier", which is the crowd barrier at a venue, the line separating the photographers and the security from everybody who paid. That is a precise description of what the job was. Somebody stands in the small gap in front of the stage and tells the rest of the room what they saw, and the entire value of it depends on that person actually having been there.

~ when it actually stopped ~

No closure was announced anywhere and the reference works simply say 2024. The clearest evidence sits in the Internet Archive, which had been crawling the site every few weeks for two decades and holds a capture on 20 October 2023, then nothing at all until 3 May 2024. A gap of six and a half months in a record that dense is a hosting failure rather than a quiet patch. When the domain reappeared in May the page title had changed from the old strapline to the bare word gigwise.com, which is what a domain looks like when somebody new has just pointed it somewhere.

Twenty three years of work went off the public web in whatever week that happened, with no post explaining it and nobody to ask. The archive of old articles stayed reachable for a while under its original addresses, which is how a site can be dead and still answer.

~ what is posting there now ~

An expired masthead with two decades of inbound links pointing at it is a valuable object, and it is valuable for reasons that have nothing to do with what the masthead once meant. Search engines trust an old domain. That trust was earned by people writing about bands and it can be spent on anything, so the site now sells the accumulated credibility of a Liverpool gig listings page to whatever wants ranking that month, which is currently a mixture of celebrity gossip and affiliate copy about gambling.

The bylines are the part that stays with you. There is a whole staff listed, with beats and specialisms, writing in a register that sounds like a magazine. Nothing about it is refutable from outside and nothing about it is checkable either, and the effect on a reader arriving from a search result is that Gigwise is a going concern with a features desk. The publication died. The name kept the job.

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