About the site

When my partner Nick Despotopoulos and I started The Tracking Angle in 1995, we envisioned a music magazine without boundaries. One that covered every genre, from throughout the history of recorded music, and on every available format - especially, but not limited to, vinyl. We also felt that no music magazine or music section of any magazine dealt adequately with the sound quality of the recordings being reviewed. This is of special interest to "audiophiles," but also to any music lover considering yet another remastered reissue of a favorite title.

Music is music but recordings of music are products, and if sound quality wasn't an important aspect of a recording, we didn't know what was. After a decade of reading raves about the superb sound quality of awful sounding CDs, we were going to set the record straight: praising the great ones and singling out the poor ones for ridicule.

We started with a two color stapled 24 page magazine and ended four years later with an award winning, full color, glossy, perfect bound 112 page quarterly magazine that received world-wide acclaim. We had a tremendously talented staff of writers and correspondents and had created an internal camaraderie and sense of community far stronger than we had ever dreamed of. The Tracking Angle went from zero readers to around 15,000 with minimal expenditures on advertising or promotion.

A small number compared to the giants, but with a little help, we felt we could grow exponentially and go to bi-monthly and eventually monthly. Our newsstand sales were incredibly good, and when readers told us their two favorite music rags were MOJO (our favorite) and The Tracking Angle, we knew we were headed in the right direction, both as a magazine, and as a journalistic endeavor covering the recorded music business.

Unfortunately, the music biz at the time didn't feel it needed a music review magazine that covered up to 70 titles per issue, reaching a small but dedicated group of music lovers and software buyers. As we headed into our fifth money-losing year, the industry began its long contraction and consolidation and advertising revenues not only failed to grow to cover expenses, they actually shrank. We regretfully pulled the plug.

So now, I begin again, solo with musicangle.com - a high-tech continuation of The Tracking Angle, again starting small, with hopes for rapid growth. Business plans for the site were formulated with help from Nick Despotopoulos and a non-financial "silent partner" in The Tracking Angle, David L'Heureux without whose help we never could have published the magazine as efficiently as we did.

musicangle.com in the winter of 2002 with reviews of the ten releases listed in my Stereophile "Analog Corner" column's "In Heavy Rotation" box, with content changing once a month timed to the release of Stereophile. Now, with the site fully built, and with my securing the back content of The Tracking Angle, we'll be able to add content and reviews in "real-time," so you'll be able to find new and interesting reviews and news every time you log-on as well as back content of The Tracking Angle being added on a regular basis. Thanks to John Atkinson for allowing me to use my "Analog Corner" as a launching pad for musicangle.com.

I thank our first advertisers for their faith in musicangle.com and for their early support. Please support them by clicking through to their sites - and if you feel like it, let them know how much you appreciate their support of musicangle.com.

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