Wall of Sound

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

~ the obituary ~

The domain went up on 6 october 1996. Two years later I got my first modem, and by then this site had already been bought once. Wall of Sound was built by Starwave, the software and web company Paul Allen funded in Seattle after leaving Microsoft, and it was a spin-off of Mr. Showbiz, Starwave's entertainment property. The offices were in Smith Tower, which had been the tallest building west of the Mississippi in 1914 and by the nineties was the kind of address a web company took when it wanted to look serious.

What Starwave did that most early web ventures did not was hire people who had already done the job on paper. The editor was Erik Flannigan, who had written for The Rocket in Seattle and co-authored a Led Zeppelin biography in 1991. Gary Graff and Daniel Durchholz, who edited the MusicHound album guides, contributed regularly. The result was a site that filed reviews and release dates at a moment when almost nobody was doing that outside of print, and the reviews were good enough that Metacritic pulled them into its aggregate scores.

In april 1997 Starwave entered a joint venture with ABC News, and Disney finished buying the company outright the following year. Wall of Sound became part of the Go Network, which meant its URL changed to wallofsound.go.com and its fate got attached to a portal strategy nobody at the music desk controlled. The staff kept doing the work anyway. In february 2000 the news editor Anders Wright, one of the site's co-founders, went public against the recording academy for shutting online music writers out of the Grammy ceremony, saying the only thing the exclusion achieved was making it harder for people to get information about the awards.

None of this reached me. In 2000 I was sixteen in Ankara on a dial-up line, and American release dates were not a thing I had any use for. Records arrived here through shops, and a bit later through file sharing, and a website that told you what came out on tuesday in the united states was solving a problem I did not have. I found the site the way I find most of these, years afterward, through a dead redirect.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

It is easy to flatten this into another dot-com casualty, but the interesting part is what it proved before it died. Wall of Sound was a music publication with no print edition behind it, and it was staffed at the level of a magazine rather than a fan page. That combination was rare in 1997. Most music writing online at the time was either a label's promotional page or a listener's own homepage, and the professional press was still deciding whether the web counted.

The Grammys fight is the clearest evidence of the gap. The recording academy would not credential online music journalists in 2000, which meant the people running one of the largest music sites in the country were treated as not being press. Wright said so publicly. Within a few years that argument was over and everyone had lost track of who had won it, mostly because the print side stopped being able to afford the fight.

~ the postmortem ~

Disney announced it was closing the Go.com portal in january 2001 and took a charge of hundreds of millions of dollars on the internet business. The properties came apart over the following months. The archive shows Wall of Sound working normally on 31 may 2001, and by 19 june the same address served a single graphic on a gray page: the site logo, and under it the line wall of sound is now closed, thanks for your support, with a link to Mr. Showbiz and a ten second meta refresh.

Mr. Showbiz lasted five more months. In november 2001 it got the same treatment, with its own goodbye image reading after six years as the web's best entertainment site, Mr. Showbiz has retired, redirecting to ABCNews.com. So the last thing Wall of Sound pointed at died too, and the chain of farewell pages collapsed into one entertainment section on a news site.

The address still resolves. Type wallofsound.go.com today and Disney's Go.com portal answers, which is a strange kind of afterlife for a music desk. The reviews are not gone either, in the sense that Metacritic scores from that era still carry weight the site contributed to, sitting inside aggregate numbers that get quoted decades later by people who have never heard of the publication that supplied them.

What did not survive is the model. A staffed music magazine paid for by a media conglomerate, with no subscription and no separate print business under it, was an experiment that ran for about five years and then stopped being tried for a long time. When it came back it came back smaller, and it came back without Smith Tower.

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