AbsolutePunk

• 1. Introduction

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  AbsolutePunk was a website that knew what it was before the rest of the internet figured out what it was trying to be. Jason Tate founded it on the 6th of June, 2000, as a fan site for Blink-182 and MxPx. Within five years, it was pulling six million hits a day. By 2006, a trade publication called OMMA was writing that it was beginning to chip away at the dominance of MySpace. How does a niche alternative music forum grow into one of the largest of its kind on the internet? And what happens when the thing you built gets sold out from under you, then handed back in ruins? Those are the questions at the heart of AbsolutePunk's story.

• 2. The Site Takes Shape

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  What Tate built went well beyond a fan page. AbsolutePunk offered album reviews, interviews, articles, journals, and photo galleries. Its backbone was a vBulletin internet forum system where any registered user could create a profile and comment on nearly every part of the site. That openness was by design. Record label representatives and band members could apply for special accounts that identified them as industry figures, and threads were often created specifically so fans could interact with them directly. That kind of access was unusual for a music site at the turn of the millennium. By the time the community reached over 500,000 music fans, it had become something closer to a small city than a website. The primary genres were emo and pop punk, but the site cast a wide net, and it had a track record of covering artists before they crossed over to mainstream audiences, including Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy.

• 3. Fundraising and Community

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  On the 1st of June, 2005, Andrew McMahon, the vocalist and pianist for Something Corporate and Jack's Mannequin, was diagnosed with leukemia. AbsolutePunk responded by selling orange gel wristbands online. The bands read "I Will Fight", a phrase drawn from the Something Corporate song "Watch the Sky". More than 6,000 bracelets were sold, raising approximately $16,400 for the Leukemia Research Foundation. That campaign illustrated something the site's traffic numbers alone could not: AbsolutePunk had cultivated a community willing to act together. The site also used its reach to sponsor tours and host or premiere exclusive content from bands, giving it a foothold in the actual music industry rather than just the press covering it.

• 4. Recognition and Scale

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  In the August 2007 issue of Blender magazine, Jason Tate was named number 18 on the publication's list of the top 25 most influential people in online music. That ranking arrived as AbsolutePunk was at or near its peak influence. Despite losing some material to server migrations over the years, the site still held more than 55,000 news articles, 2,500 reviews, 500 interviews, and 52,000 files in its multimedia gallery. Those figures put it among the most content-rich alternative music archives on the internet. The social media network Buzznet took notice, and in May 2008 it purchased AbsolutePunk outright. That sale would set in motion events that neither Tate nor the site's half-million-strong community could have anticipated.

• 5. Sale, Collapse, and Closure

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  Buzznet was part of Buzzmedia, a company that later filed for bankruptcy. When Buzzmedia collapsed, the ownership of AbsolutePunk became tangled in the wreckage. Tate eventually reclaimed the site's domain and name. Rather than attempt to rebuild, he chose to close it. AbsolutePunk shut down on the 1st of April, 2016. The closure ended sixteen years of daily publishing and community building that had begun with a teenager's fan page and grown into a publication influential enough to appear in the pages of Blender. What Tate built during those years, and then got back just long enough to put to rest, left behind a record of over 55,000 news articles and a generation of alternative music fans who organized, grieved, and argued together on its forums.