Collapse Board: The First Year

The stats, as always, are fascinating and a constant source of pride, watching as the site grows.

For most of 2011 we’ve been going along in the region of about 20,000 unique visitors each month (in the last couple of months this doubled to 40,000 unique visitors, although I’m guessing a lot of the traffic is coming for the Kreayshawn article which has taken on a life of its own and is the most read article in the last 12 months). My favourite of the Google Analytics datasets is the Map Overlay section. The data for the last year shows that we’ve had visitors from 181 countries pay the site a visit, with the Top 10 countries for visitors being:

1. United States
2. Australia
3. United Kingdom
4. Canada
5. Italy
6. France
7. Germany
8. Spain
9. Japan
10. Ireland

The breakdown of data by city is even more interesting (although Google Analytics doesn’t deal with city data very well and reports some suburbs as separate cities meaning that, according to the data, people from 10,457 cities have visited us in the last year). Throughout the year Brisbane has always been the Number 1 city (I think) but on a day-to-day basis the rest of the Top 5 has moved around a bit and on some days more people are reading us in New York than they are in Melbourne, which is always a weird but thrilling feeling. Over the year the Top 10 cities by visitor numbers have been:

1. Brisbane
2. London
3. Sydney
4. Melbourne
5. New York
6. Seattle
7. Athens
8. Los Angeles
9. Manchester
10. Dublin

That Collapse Board is being read so widely, so far away from Australia is a fantastic achievement and it was also a major objective of the site to try to share some of our favourite Australia acts and, more importantly, to have reviewers from outside of Australia review Australian music. This is still a work-in-progress and something I think we should be looking to do in the future, even though it seems to court controversy, especially in Brisbane. The way I look at it is that if someone in say Athens, Georgia listens to your record they might say some negative things about it but someone in Athens, Georgia still listened to your record and had an opinion, and maybe the things they wrote made it appeal or interest someone else to go and listen to it. To me that’s far more honest than a well done, good for you, pat on the back and a non-committal, three-stars-out-of-five review you’d get in Australia.  Plus it’s got a lot more integrity than a glowing 4-and-a-half-stars review that you would get when your housemate or someone with a vested interest in your band might write for street press. 

Over the year I’ve gotten more used to the accusations of Collapse Board being a bunch of haters. I know that there’s far more positive writing on the site than there is negative but it infuriates that all the focus goes on anything negative that is written, whereas you can write about how brilliant you think a certain act or a certain song is and it gets little attention most of the time. Over the year I’ve also gotten used to the hate aimed in our direction; some of the bile and vitriol that is written about us is far more extreme than anything that’s actually been published on the site but in the end you just have to laugh it off. Often it’s so over the top it’s easy to do. Maybe that makes us the Millwall of the Australian music media; no one likes us and we don’t care.

My thanks to Everett for all his hard work, which goes so far and beyond the call of duty it’s not funny, and to everyone who’s contributed over the last 365 days.

Collapse Board is one, but I think we’re only really getting started.

So whatever did happen to the music press?

Photo: Will Clayton

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by ed

Justin Edwards is a regular contributor to Brisbane's weekly street press magazine, Rave and his photographs have also been published in Rolling Stone, Plan B magazine, Mess+Noise, the Herald-Sun and Blunt, as well as on numerous music and band websites.

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