inthemix

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

~ the obit ~

Nineteen years is a long time for a forum, and forums are the one part of this story i can read from the inside. My own were the Turkish ones, donanimhaber and frmtr, and the shape was identical. A thread that has been running for four years, and a signature block with your hardware list in it that carries a standing meaning nothing outside the site. inthemix was that structure pointed at Australian dance music, which is a scene i have no claim on at all. The building is familiar. The city is not.

It started in 1999 as photographs. Andre Lackmann and Libby Clark were documenting the underground rave and club nights around Sydney, and the site existed so people could look for themselves in the pictures from Saturday. That is a small idea with a strong pull, because checking whether you got photographed is a reason to come back on Monday, and once you are back on Monday you post in the thread about the lineup.

The forum outgrew the photos. Through the early 2000s inthemix became where the Australian electronic scene did its business: promoters announcing dates, and everyone else arguing about whether a room had sold out too fast. Event listings ran per capital city, Adelaide through Sydney, with ticket sales attached. Mainstream Australian media covered almost none of this at the time, so for about a decade the site was not a record of the scene. It was the infrastructure of it.

The founders built a company on top, Sound Alliance, and launched other titles under it. Sound Alliance became Junkee Media in July 2015 and Junkee was later bought by oOh!media, an outdoor advertising firm. Somewhere in that sequence inthemix stopped being the thing the company was and became one property in a portfolio, which is the position everything gets moved from eventually.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the awards ~

The inthemix Awards, which started as the Sony inthemix50, ran for close to fifteen years and were reported on by Rolling Stone Australia and the rest of the national music press. A reader poll from a website became the thing an Australian DJ put in a press bio. The Stafford Brothers and Tigerlily both came up through it.

An awards program is the clearest proof that a community site has stopped being a community site and become a publisher. Somebody has to sell the sponsorship and somebody has to manage the voting, and the readers who used to run the place are now the audience for an event about them. inthemix crossed that line early and survived it longer than most.

~ the merge ~

Nothing broke. On 15 November 2018 Junkee Media published a farewell saying the media landscape had changed over eighteen years and that Music Junkee had grown into the company's voice for all music coverage. Electronic music would keep being covered, just not under this name. The forums had already thinned out by then in the way every forum thinned out once the arguments moved to Facebook groups and the photographs moved to Instagram, where the scene tagged itself instead of waiting for a photographer to upload on Monday.

That is a merger rather than a failure, and it still removes the same thing. A specialist site with nineteen years of continuity gets absorbed into a general one, and the archive stops being a place with its own front page. The name went first, then the reason anyone had to type it.

~ what got kept ~

The National Library of Australia had already selected inthemix for PANDORA, its collection of web publications judged nationally significant, so a machine in Canberra has been taking snapshots of a rave photo site for years. Academic work has used it as a primary source on Sydney club subcultures, including a 2010 study out of Southern Cross University about how the scene organized itself around the forum.

A national library deciding to archive your website is the strangest possible compliment and it is also the correct one. Almost nothing else recorded what an Australian club night looked like between 1999 and 2010 at that resolution, week by week, from the inside. The scene wrote its own history because nobody else was going to, and then a librarian noticed.

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