Two decades of independent music coverage
All the way back in 2003, a scrappy new webzine was born.
It was a different era: guitar music was undergoing something of a revolution—or so it felt at the time—and the internet was a burgeoning place for music fans to discover new artists, find news about the bands they loved, and even download music using a fancy technology called "mp3s". YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and all the social networks we know and tolerate were yet to be dreamed up in Silicon Valley boardrooms. But there was Scene Point Blank.
For our tenth anniversary we published a book (and as a special treat for reading this introduction, here's a free e-book download of it!). For this, our twentieth anniversary(!), we've asked SPB contributors past and present—plus a few of the artists and labels we've featured over the years—to reflect on what this place means to them.
This isn't a completely navel-gazing exercise. Whether you've been reading this webzine since the early days, or if this is your first time on our blue-tinged pages, you'll have some thoughts on how the online music world has evolved (or devolved) in that time. Our writers and friends below try to be objective and reflective about what those years have brought us, and how we all ended up here.
We've also taken the trouble of recreating our Best Of 2003 album list in Spotify, if you'd like to re-live the heady days when the Blood Brothers and Xiu Xiu ruled the roost. If you weren't there, 20 years ago, you may be interested to learn that we had one of our contributors' parents review the albums we chose that year. Happy nostalgia fest!
So cast your mind back (or imagine what it was like, if you were too young to be there the first time), and hear what our writers and friends make of two decades of SPB.
— the SPB team
PS: yes, we're aware that if we started in 2003, our 20th anniversary was technically in 2023, not 2024. But we had to wait until 2023 was finished before we could say we'd completed two full decades of publishing, okay?! And anyway, if we don't post things late then it's not really Scene Point Blank. Whatever.
