October 27, 2004 is the beginning of the CDM story archive. That’s visible by going to page 1,150 (as I write this). And hello 2024: this is post 11,491.
A blog I began at createdigitalmusic.com began somewhat unceremoniously on that date with two posts. I’ll, uh, properly celebrate the 20th anniversary of CDM a little bit later, as it took some weeks before I settled into M-F daily publishing. At the time, I thought the blog would be a side project. I was writing a book at the time; I registered that domain because I wanted Create Digital Music to be the title. The publisher, Peachpit Press (now defunct / Pearson), overruled me and substituted Real World Digital Audio. The book didn’t succeed, though I understand it had a surprisingly good run being pirated in its Polish-language translation (seriously). The site is what has lasted.
I don’t seem to have screenshots of the original site, but that’s a relief – it was awful. It had a horrible logo I designed and ran on the truly awful Mambo CMS. Security was so bad that early in the site’s life I was hacked by a far-right Turkish group; for a few hours, the site was replaced by some scary fascist marching band music and had a picture of an eagle or something.
Fortunately, readers came to the rescue, including Jaymis Loveday who worked on site admin and co-founded the sister site Create Digital Motion as a contributor, and Nat Jeanneret who designed two versions of the logo and site design plus the original MeeBlip panel. We switched from Mambo to WordPress and haven’t looked back. (The current logo design comes from Anette Hansen.)
CDM (later known just by its acronym) joined a rich blogosphere at the time. In October 2004, Facebook was still TheFacebook and available only to academic addresses. YouTube didn’t exist yet. Twitter wouldn’t exist until 2006. Google Reader was still a year off, so RSS was an ecosystem, not a monoculture that Google could kill off (as they did).
Instead, we had flourishing blog rings where people happily referred to each other’s work, and sites from the same era like the original Music Thing by Tom Whitwell and Analog Industries by Chris Randall, plus the inimitable Boing Boing and folks like Xeni Jardin, or We Make Money Not Art and Régine Debatty. And those projects survive, too, now, along with later additions like Matrixsynth, Synthtopia, VJ Union, and others.
Without a hint of nostalgia, I can say things were better. There’s a difference there. Let me illustrate. “1. Music was better in my day; new music sucks now.” Nostalgia. And no, obviously you’re incorrect. “2. Life was better in our day before The Happening, praise be to Our Overlords, but I sometimes miss the time before the Nights of Pain when I didn’t have this thought control harness on my–OWWWWWWWAAGUUGGGH!” Yeah, you may have a point there.
At the same time, we have all kinds of technology in 2024 that I would never want to give up – including more evolved internet tools. The question is whether we’ll use them, and how. So I want to commit the 21st year of CDM to looking back and figuring out how we can reimagine being creative on the Internet.
Meanwhile, what was the news from October 2004? Well, I was talking to David Gibbons and (pre-Avid) Digidesign, on OSXFAQ which incredibly also still exists. I was still writing for another Blog Survivor, O’Grady’s PowerPage (now 31 years old!). And I was looking at a couple of new things at AES. Two of those still hold up: Soundflower is deceased, but inter-app audio on the Mac still works well via other tools. And AAS’ analog models are included in Ableton Live and Ultra Analog is up to VA-3.
And yeah, Pro Tools 6.7 was out (screenshot at top), though that was also a bit retro for 2004 (love those 80s MIDI sequencer features).
I remember that over the years, the question most asked of me was – what’s new? What’s exciting? Sometimes that;s meant looking around, forward, backward – everything. But I have always been indebted to readers for helping find the answer to those questions.
In challenging times, we might also ask: what can we change for the better?
CDM 20 will be a regular feature with both retrospectives and new ideas for 2024-2025.
note: there is some CDM prehistory prior to the start of that archive as even Wayback Machine recalls the site starting earlier. I think there was some content from earlier in the year.