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History
Splendid was launched in November, 1996, rising phoenix-like from the ashes of long-running e-mail-based music 'zine IMR. We began with three writers and the modest goal of publishing five new reviews each week. (If we'd started a bit sooner, or been a bit more organized, we could've nabbed Splendid.com. Hindsight is 20/20.)
As those of you who were online at that time will recall, the web was a very different place in 1996. Wall-to-wall black Times New Roman text on a grey background was still an acceptable form of information distribution, and spiffy new toys like animated gifs, frames, background tiles and rollovers were abused with boundless enthusiasm. Graphic designers had yet to migrate to the web en masse, Flash was a bad idea waiting to happen and a 33.6 modem made you the fastest kid on the block. Splendid's early content was, in all honesty, a good example of how not to do HTML...but we persevered.
(Incidentally, as you may have noticed if you've browsed through the older areas of the site, we've left that content pretty much exactly as it was on the day we posted it. We didn't just do this because we're lazy, although that certainly played a part. We honestly wanted to preserve the artifacts of a simpler time, so that we never lose sight of where we came from...)
In 1998, after two years under the wing of Lucky Garage Records, Splendid made the move to its own domain. At that point, things started to pick up momentum. Shortly after buying the domain, we also realized that Splendid had evolved far beyond the modest implications of the word "e-zine" -- but people knew the name, so we kept it.
Splendid's pledge to review everything we received meant that as more and more labels discovered us and sent us their music, we were "forced" to run more and more reviews each week in order to keep up -- it was either that, or be slowly buried in music. As an increasing number of readers discovered Splendid, we attempted to meet their needs and keep them occupied -- adding more and more music to the Boombox, devising the Departments, increasing the roll-out of new Features to monthly, then bi-weekly, then weekly, and of course writing more and more reviews.
By the Summer of 2001, Splendid was receiving more than 200 new CDs each month -- from record labels on every continent but Antarctica (and we're working on that) -- and publishing as many as fifty new reviews each week. We realized that we were offering people too much content all at once. We'd joked for years that if and when we reached the five year mark, we'd turn Splendid into a daily publication -- and as November, 2001 approached, it became clear that that was what we'd need to do.
That was three years ago. After three years as a daily site, and eight years in operation, we've racked up more than 200 features, thousands of articles, more than 3000 Boombox tracks and something on the order of 13,000 reviews -- and we still continue to roll out new content seven days a week. We now receive something like 1000 CDs a month, and -- unfortunately -- bands must often wait three months to be reviewed. Such are the perils of success. While we recently hinted at the possible end of our everything-gets-reviewed policy, it looks like we'll continue that way for the foreseeable future.
Our Promise:
Splendid was built on a simple idea: you never know where your next favorite album is going to come from. For eight years, we've had an open submission policy: if you send us your music, we'll review it. During that time, we've reviewed everything from home-recorded cassettes and CD-Rs to major-label albums. By promising to review everything we receive, and taking that promise seriously, we've opened our doors to an endless supply of music -- much of it good, some of it...not so good. We've discoved countless new and unique artists, launched a few careers, and helped to shape the tastes of the adventurous internet music scene. We've also become a highly respected source of online music criticism.
We take our promise as seriously today as we did in 1996: if you send us your music, we'll review it. We don't review cassettes any more, but that's the only restriction. Splendid receives more than 800 music submissions every month, so we might not be able to review your album as quickly as we could in 1996 -- but we will get to it.
The Splendid Staff
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