''Dotmusic'' was a music

webzine An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet, through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of the first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to being online only was the computer maga ...

that existed as a standalone website from 1 June 1995 to December 2003. Initially intended as the web complement to the UK music industry trade magazine ''

Music Week ''Music Week'' is a trade publication for the UK record industry distributed via a website and a monthly print magazine. It is published by Future. History Founded in 1959 as '' Record Retailer'', it relaunched on 18 March 1972 as ''Music W ...

'', the site was relaunched in December 1998 as a website for music fans with features, interviews and the UK charts. The site was edited by Andy Strickland and among its most prominent writers were Nimalan Nadesalingam (Nimalan Nades) who contributed artist biographies and James Masterton who contributed a weekly UK chart commentary. After an internship in summer 2000,

Alex Donne Johnson Lex Johnson is a British designer, director and creative executive. He is the founder of creative agency DAZZLE SHIP, a former lecturer at Swedish design institute Hyper Island, and the founding online director of RWD Magazine, RWD magazine and ...

used his experience at ''Dotmusic'' to go on and found the urban music website '' RWDmag'', which later become one of the key players in the development of

grime Grime may refer to: * Dirt, in the form of black, ingrained dust * Grime (music genre), a genre of music * ''Grime'' (album), a 2001 album by Iniquity * ''Grime'' (video game), a 2021 Metroidvania video game * "Grime", a 2022 song by Dallas Woo ...

UK garage UK garage, abbreviated as UKG, is a genre of electronic dance music which originated in England in the early to mid-1990s. The genre was most clearly inspired by garage house, but also incorporates elements from dance-pop, R&B, and jungle. It ...

and

dubstep Dubstep is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in South London in the early 2000s. The style emerged as a UK garage offshoot that blended 2-step rhythms and sparse dub production, as well as incorporating elements of broken be ...

online. ''Dotmusic'' included one of the earliest pay download music services, ''Dotmusic On Demand''. It was also famous for its discussion forum, one of the most popular and active message boards in the UK. As well as forums devoted to various artists, there was a free-for-all, off-topic forum called Dotmusic Lite, known as DotLite for short. A number of DotCons - conventions for ''Dotmusic'' users - were held in cities around the UK from 1999 onwards. There was a major online marketing campaign in 1999, followed by a TV press and online campaign in 2000. The site was regularly in the top ten sites for children. ''Dotmusic'' was originally owned by Miller Freeman, Inc., before being sold to BT in 2002. In 2003, the site was sold to

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

"Yahoo! joins up dots for UK music site.", The Guardian, 29 October 2003, p21 and subsequently incorporated into Yahoo!'s UK based music portal, UK Launch. The main ''Dotmusic'' site shut down at the end of 2003. The regular forum posters created a number of replacement boards in an effort to retain the community.

References

External links

Archive of Dotmusic.co.uk
- from the ''

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

''. Online music magazines published in the United Kingdom BT Group Yahoo! acquisitions 1995 establishments in the United Kingdom 2003 disestablishments in the United Kingdom {{music-website-stub