HitQuarters

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

~ the obit ~

HitQuarters went live on 20 September 1999 and sold access to the one thing an unsigned band genuinely could not find: the names and contact details of the people inside record companies who decide what gets signed. The database was called HitTracker, and it was indexed by track record, so you could look up which A&R person had actually put their name on the acts you sounded like rather than cold-mailing a general inbox.

Around the database sat a real publication. HitQuarters ran a weekly long-form interview with somebody from the trade, and the guest list over the years is genuinely hard to beat for a website nobody outside the industry has heard of. Simon Cowell sat for one. So did Diane Warren and Linda Perry. The tone was closer to a trade briefing than to a celebrity profile, with the interviewee asked to explain how they found things and what they threw away.

The rest of the site was built for the people reading those interviews. There were free promo pages for unsigned artists and a demo review feature where a rotating panel of A&R people and producers listened to uploads and said in public whether they would take a meeting. A sister site, SongQuarters, did the same job for songwriters, publishing leads about which artists were looking for material and letting members pitch songs at them, split between established acts and developing ones.

It worked often enough to have a list of names attached to it. The Knife came through the site, as did Lesley Roy, among a longer roll of members who ended up signed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the chart ~

The cleverest thing HitQuarters ever built was the A&R chart, which as far as anyone can establish was the first of its kind anywhere. It scored individual A&R representatives on points earned from the chart performance of the artists they had signed, and published a World Top 100 ranking of them. Clive Davis and Dr. Dre had both held the number one spot. In 2004 Diana Meltzer of Wind-Up Records became the first woman to top it, which was reported at the time as the milestone it was in a job that was and largely still is male. Turning the invisible half of the record business into a league table was an idea nobody had bothered to have before.

~ the other end of the business ~

My own contact with the music industry between 2002 and 2005 was an internet cafe in Turkey and MP3 files pulled off whatever file-sharing network still worked that month. That is the consumer end of the exact business HitQuarters was documenting. While a few hundred of us were burning albums onto CD-Rs at an hourly rate, there was a subscription website quietly selling the phone number of the person who had decided that album should exist.

I am an engineer and never tried to get signed, so this site was never going to be for me. What it documented, though, was the machinery that the file-sharing era was busy destroying from the other direction, and it kept documenting it in detail right through the years when the money was draining out.

~ the suspended page ~

The end is legible in the archive and it is not a shutdown announcement. The last full capture of the homepage is 4 October 2019, and the newest dated items visible on it are from 2014. The Twitter account had gone quiet in March 2015 and the Facebook page in May 2015. On 30 December 2019 the server started returning a 500 error, and from 17 January 2020 onward every request to the front page was redirected to /cgi-sys/suspendedpage.cgi, which is the default cPanel page a host serves when it suspends an account. The bill stopped being paid and the host did what hosts do.

Wikipedia's article still says the site was active until 20 September 2020, which does not survive contact with the archive: by that date the domain had been through nine months of suspension and was serving a generic error. Today hitquarters.com redirects to a ww80 subdomain, the standard shape of a parked domain being farmed for ad clicks. Twenty years of interviews with the people who built modern pop are in the Internet Archive and nowhere else.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »