Monkeybuzz

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

~ the eulogy ~

Music sites do not usually get to pick their last day. The domain lapses, or a host stops paying, or the last post just sits there for four years until someone notices. Monkeybuzz chose a date and wrote it down. On 5 November 2025 it published a farewell, put a retrospective next to it and stopped.

It started in 2012. Lucas Repullo was twenty and launched with more than a hundred album reviews already written, which tells you what kind of thing it was going to be: not a news wire but a review desk, in Portuguese, aimed at alternative and independent records that the Brazilian mainstream press was covering thinly or not at all. The register was informal and explanatory rather than clever, and it stayed that way for thirteen years.

It grew the way small music publications grew in that decade, which is sideways rather than up. A visual rebuild in 2013 added a player built on SoundCloud. There was consulting from the business incubator at ESPM, live nights programmed with Balaclava Records, and a stretch where the feed sat inside MTV Brasil's web portal. For the fifth anniversary in 2017 it curated a monthly run of shows at Breve in Sao Paulo. None of that is a business model. All of it is the sort of thing you do instead of having one.

I was never a reader. The language is the plain reason and I am not going to dress it up: thirteen years of Brazilian record criticism in Portuguese was never going to reach a Turkish engineer who reads English. The less comfortable part is that I cannot name the Turkish equivalent I read either. By 2012 I was twenty eight and had already stopped finding music through people who write about it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

The staffing was the usual shape for this kind of site: a founder who was also the editor for a long time, a masthead of contributors who came and went, and by the end an editor named Mauricio Amendola Assis. Nobody in that arrangement is doing it for the rate. The output ran to news, reviews, long interviews and video, and the volume over thirteen years is described in its own farewell as hundreds and then corrected to thousands.

The events and the MTV arrangement matter more than they look. A Portuguese-language independent music site in the 2010s had almost no advertising floor to stand on, so the writing subsidized itself by turning into something else: a night at a venue, a curation credit, a feed licensed to a bigger portal. That is how a thirteen-year run gets financed when there is no subscription and no owner with money.

~ the last post ~

The farewell is signed by Assis and it does not blame anything. It says the site worked from 2012 with a manual under its arm, "Desde 2012, o Monkeybuzz trabalhou com esse manual debaixo do braço", the manual being the position that music is a serious subject. It counts the output as hundreds and then says, no, thousands. It thanks the people who wrote and the people who read "ou lerão", or will read, future tense, because the archive was not going anywhere.

The closing line is the one worth keeping. "Lutamos a boa luta, combatemos o bom combate", we fought the good fight, and then the editor says that looking at everything produced along the way, he calls it a win. Not many publications get to end on that sentence and mean it. Most end on a redirect to a parent company.

~ what stays up ~

"O site continua para sempre" is the promise in the farewell, the site continues forever, and thirteen years of pages are still there to check it against. The domain answers. The WordPress install is a child theme sitting on twentysixteen, and the wordmark this grave uses is an SVG in that theme's images directory, still being served to anyone who asks for it.

Which is why this page says dormant and not dead. Monkeybuzz stopped being a publication on a specific Wednesday in November 2025 and became a library instead, on purpose, with a note on the door. That is a rarer ending than the ones this site usually records.

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