Aural Fixation: The Five Year Anniversary of Dave’s Music Database Blog

Aural Fixation: The Five-Year Anniversary of Dave’s Music Database Blog

“Aural Fixation” is a music-themed column I wrote for PopMatters.com from 2011-2013. They are no longer online there, but I have reformatted them here at the DMDB blog with additional videos, photos, and links, such as where to buy referenced albums. I have also used the title “Aural Fixation” for any essays I have written outside of PopMatters.com as well. To see the essays, check out the Dave’s Music Database Aural Fixation page. The essays from PopMatters.com have been gathered in book form as Aural Fixation: Essays from a Music Obsessive. Essays written from 2009 to 2011 have been gathered in the book No One Needs 21 Versions of “Purple Haze”. You can purchase the essays in book format here.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the DMDB blog. It has come a long way in five years! That first post, entitled “How to Get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame”, mocked that institution’s biases with five observations about what will (or won’t) lead to canonization in Cleveland. I ripped on the organization for failing to induct acts like Kiss, Rush, Genesis, and Alice Cooper. All are now in. I put up a whopping 13 posts in 2009 and another 14 in 2010. About mid-way through 2011, I changed the focus of the blog from essays on music-related topics to more objective snapshots of musical history tied to that particular day. That paid off in spades. Prior to the thematic switch, my biggest month was September 2009 with 422 hits. I more than doubled that number in June 2011 with the new approach. I noted in a 2012 post, “The History of the Dave’s Music Database Blog”, how the blog had mustered 31,000 hits. I was quite proud. It has grown by more than ten times that in the last two years. By the end of January, the blog should log 400,000 views. I’m not sure how I’ve been so lucky to get so much attention to my blog, but I’m grateful to all the fans. Thank you for reading! The Fifteen-Year Anniversary: And now for another update – January 22, 2024 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the DMDB blog! The blog has now amassed five million hits, an average of more than 900 hits a day! The most popular post, with over 120,000 hits, is “The Top Songs by Decade, 1800-2019.” Not far behind is “Radio’s Most-Played Songs in History” with 119,000 hits. Resources and Related Links: Dave’s Music Database: “Aural Fixation essays page” First posted 1/22/2014; last updated 1/21/2024.