The 405

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

~ the last words ~

The 405 published its first article on 28 April 2008, out of London, run by a man called Oliver Primus who founded it and edited it and was still editing it eleven and a half years later when it stopped. It covered independent music mostly, with film and clothes around the edges, in the format that defined the period: reviews, interviews, sessions recorded in whatever room was available, playlists, a podcast.

It was never large and it was never quite small either. Green Man and Iceland Airwaves both ran partnerships with it, as did Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, which meant a site with a handful of paid people got press access alongside outlets that had buildings. The BBC quoted it. So did the Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, the Independent and the Telegraph, which is the specific kind of validation an independent music site could accumulate in the 2010s and could not convert into money.

The last run of posts went up in October 2019, and the site simply stopped updating. On 30 November Primus posted from his personal Twitter account that it was the final day of The 405 and that it had been a wild ride. There was no closure essay and no fundraiser. The archive stayed up for a while afterward, and then the domain changed hands.

~ the record ~

~ the name ~

It comes from a Death Cab for Cutie song on We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes, from 2000. The song is named after Interstate 405 in Seattle. So a London music site spent eleven years named after a Washington State freeway by way of an American indie rock record, and never once explained the joke on its own front page.

~ the money that was never there ~

Sites like this ran on display advertising sold against traffic, and between 2013 and 2019 the traffic moved to Facebook and then the advertising moved to Facebook too. The ones that survived either got bought or moved to memberships. The 405 did neither. It was one person's site for its entire life, with contributors who were mostly writing for the byline, and that arrangement holds for exactly as long as the founder can keep holding it.

My own music discovery in the years The 405 was starting was not blogs. It was mp3s off cafe machines around 2003, and then whatever came down the TTNet line at home once broadband arrived. The English-language music-blog circuit, where a site could be famous among two thousand people who all read each other, was a scene I read the outputs of rather than lived in. What I recognize is the ending, because the whole class of site went the same way inside about five years.

~ the last post ~

thefourohfive.com still resolves. What answers now is a page ranking online casinos for an American audience, running on the domain because it kept eleven years of inbound links from music publications. The About page has been rewritten to describe a gambling review operation. Eleven years of festival coverage sat at those URLs and none of it is reachable from the front page now.

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