Mark Gresham | 15 FEB 2024
Atlanta, GA— Today, EarRelevant celebrates its fifth anniversary as a full-time publication.
Indeed, it had existed as a “very occasional” blog sometime before that. Then, after events following Thanksgiving of 2018, my blog entries took on a rather accelerated pace in the final months of its informal incarnation.
But February 15 was EarRelevant’s (and my own) Fourth of July — the date of our “Declaration of Independence,” if you will. And at that point, there was no turning back the journalistic revolution.
In April of that year, EarRelevant began step by step, taking on reviews and articles by guest contributors, publishing news and reviews of live concerts in metro Atlanta, and reviews of CDs. We continued through the summer slumps and got good traction in the new fall season.
Then, in mid-March 2020, the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and live performances with it. Performing arts organizations canceled live events and turned to live-streamed videos or innovative ways of producing their shows with maximum medical protection for performers and audiences alike.
EarRelevant followed the front edge of this transformation in the performing arts world, reviewing live streams of concerts and on-demand videos of concerts, recordings, and the few events that managed to perform before a live audience in the wake of the pandemic and socio-economic closures.
We not only survived the pandemic years, we flourished and grew, if not at a particularly steep curve. We saw a real upswing between 2021 and 2022: a 52% increase in pageviews and a 51% increase in website visitors. Then last year, in 2023, we experienced another jump of similar magnitude: a 56% increase in pageviews over 2022 and a 51% increase in visitors over the same period.
While I started with just myself as a writer, we have since published articles and other content by nearly two dozen contributors, and that list continues to grow, as does our geographical reach.
EarRelevant’s coverage in these early months of 2024 now extends to even more cities beyond Atlanta, but make no mistake: Atlanta will continue to anchor our publishing efforts as our lively and eclectic home and hub. We are extending our coverage and number of writers outside the Atlanta Digital Marketing Area and adding new local writers covering classical and post-classical music, jazz, and opera here at home. It’s all part of the original plan instigated five years ago.
Thank you all for helping us reach this milestone by reading EarRelevant! We invite you to join us on this adventurous journey into our next five years. ■
Mark Gresham
publisher / principal writer
EarRelevant / Lux Nova Press
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- EarRelevant: earrelevant.net
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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