| blabbermouth.net |
 |
| URL |
blabbermouth.net |
| Type of site |
News and reviews |
| Registration |
Optional |
| Owner |
Borivoj Krgin |
| Created by |
Borivoj Krgin |
| Launched |
March 3, 2000 |
| Current status |
Active |
blabbermouth.net is a website dedicated to heavy metal and hard rock news, as well as album and music DVD reviews. Blabbermouth.net was founded and run by Borivoj Krgin in March 2000, although the website was officially launched in October 2001, and the record label Roadrunner Records began hosting it in December 2001. Users can post comments to selected news articles and album reviews, either in response to other user comments or in response to the article itself. This has attracted trolls and criticism from many musicians.
History
Founder Borivoj Krgin came up with the concept of Blabbermouth in January 2000. Robert Kampf, a friend of Krgin who runs Century Media Records, was staying with Krgin in New York and set up a meeting with Gunter Ford of World Management. During the meeting, Ford suggested an idea for a "heavy metal portal," a site which would offer news, merchandise and CD reviews to get record labels to sell their products through the site — Ford wanted Kampf to be involved. Krgin disliked the idea and wished for a site that offered around-the-clock news as he thought that no good news sites existed.[1]
Krgin began researching how to develop and host his own website two months after the meeting. After a year Krgin felt comfortable going "live." The initial "primitive" version of the site was launched on March 3, 2001. In October of the same year Monte Conner, a friend of Krgin, and a Roadrunner Records artist and repertoire approached Krgin for the idea to host the site on Roadrunner servers. This way, Krgin could focus on the content rather than the technical aspects. In October 2001, Blabbermouth.net was officially launched.[1]
Sources
According to his own words, Krgin spends most of his time operating the site, supposedly missing out on sleep and other life essentials.[1] When finding information relating to bands Krgin claims to search bands official websites, which are usually reported on immediately, and band message boards where members of the band post. However, Krgin relies on his contacts he has made over the years ranging from band members, metal journalists, managers and other people in the music industry, stating this is where the "best" information comes from.[1]
Krgin supposedly sends e-mails and makes telephone calls daily to obtain new information. Blabbermouth.net has a 'submit news' feature which has proved to be helpful to Krgin. When receiving a rumour he deems worthy of posting, Krgin will first research and contact people related to the band and question them about the rumour. It's claimed that 90% of the information posted is either found online or is submitted directly to the website by bands, managers, labels or associated persons.[1]
Criticism
Krgin himself is not a journalist, and the accuracy and source material of several of his articles has been passionately disputed by readers, who feel they lack basic confirmation.[2] Krgin is also notorious among his critics for relying on solitary sources, rather than getting his stories backed from several of the critical players. Many of the disputing comments themselves have been deleted from the site, though not in any violation of the official site policies posted.
The close ties to the label Roadrunner Records also gives cause for concerns of bias, since Blabbermouth.net is yet to post a negative article, or even an averagely rated review of one of the label's releases; never going below 6 out of 10, and only very rarely below 8 out of 10.[3] This leads many of it's critics to suggest that Blabbermouth.net is openly displaying a classic "Don't bite the hand that feeds" conflict of interest, in spite of it's avid claims to the contrary.
Krgin also failed to act when one of his staff, Keith Bergman went on a personal vendetta against an artist on Blabbermouth.net's review section. Though blatantly biased towards the artist himself, and several times resorting to slandery of the artist's criminal background, appearing determined to force morality as a serious argument in denouncing the music itself; referring to the artist as a "coward" with regards to his recent suicide among other things, and leaving the album with an unusually low rating.[4] One that is highly disputed by most other independent reviewers.
Blabbermouth.net has been criticized by musicians and music industry persons for internet trolls (users that make derogatory comments) and news posts that are unrelated to heavy metal or hard rock.[1] This has included news articles about Gene Simmons (Kiss), Tommy Lee (Mötley Crüe), and Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit.[5] Krgin said he posts these articles to attract humorous comments from users, and as relief from the constant monotony of album news.[1] In particular, articles relating to Durst appeared after he apparently lied about the number of female celebrities he slept with; "he was doing a good job of keeping himself in the press all the time. Ultimately, the media overexposure contributed to his band's diminished record sales with their most recent album, and the downward spiral is sure to carry over into the next album cycle. In the end, no one will give a shit about Fred is sleeping with or not sleeping with, and that fate, for someone like Fred Durst, will be worse than death."[1]
However, Simmons responded by calling Blabbermouth.net "the reason I get out of my bed in the morning; and yes, I sleep on a mattress stuffed with $100 bills."[1] Lee responded on his blog: "If you go to the postings you will see moronic statements by many who have never had a child drown in their swimming pool," calling users "wicked pissah."[6]
In September 2006, Krgin claims to have performed a cleanup of Blabbermouth.net's user comments and to have adopted a moderation policy. Prior to this, in his own words, "countless abusive, obscene, defamatory, racist, homophobic and threatening comments" had been posted on the site since the "comments" feature was implemented in early 2002.[7]
Traffic
Blabbermouth.net is visited by more than 1,000,000 (one million) unique users each month, and it has an average of 80,000 unique visitors per day, based on WebTrends.[5] The busiest day of traffic was more than 150,000 unique visitors in a single 24-hour period, which occurred the day after the murder of Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell.[5] Blabbermouth.net is ranked as the 29,897 most trafficked Web sites according to Alexa.[8]. However, this number only covers the visits to www.blabbermouth.net, which is a small portion of the website's traffic (since the actual web site is located at www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net, which is not included separately in the Alexa rankings). Blabbermouth has 56,000 registered users.[5]
References
External links
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