Rock Library Rules!

Written by Ava

Barney Hoskyns is an experienced music writer and editor having written for Vogue, GQ, Rolling Stone, Spin, Harper's Bazaar, and CD Nows and penned books Across the Great Divide-The Band and America and Waiting For The Sun.

Yet in the midst of all that recognition and perhaps, publishing chaos, he's had time to found an incredible music website and archive called Rock's Backpages, that includes a library of over 15,000 interviews conducted by the best music writers and journalists in the business, an archive of music magazine past, an audio library with over 200 interviews including some from music legend Jimi Hendrix and blogs from veteran writers.

How he maintains such a popular music website while continuing his music writer reign, I don't know. But Barney is something else.

Over at Jemsite, we'll continue to watch as his music journalism accomplishments continue to grow. In the mean time, we had the chance to chat with Barney about his personal music project.

What is Rock’s Backpages?

It's an online archive of many thousands of interviews and reviews from the music press of the last 50 years – the best writers on artists from Aaliyah to ZZ Top and Elvis to Eminem.

What does it include in its repertoire?

Over 15,000 text interviews, growing by almost 200 a month, together with over 200 audio interviews with legendary figures from Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger to such contemporary acts as the Streets and the Sugababes

You’re already a music writer and editor outside of Rock’s Backpages. Why take on a position as editorial director at the site?

I didn't "take on" the position as such. I co-founded the site in 2000 and have juggled the running of it with my own journalism and books.

How do you collect your data for Rock’s Backpages and how do you make sure to include everything you possibly can?

We started with a handful of the best writers, mainly British and American, and grew from there to a point where we now have over 400 of them –on all eras and genres and as many acts as possible. There are still gaps in the library that we need to fill and we keep plugging away at it.

Perhaps you can talk about some of the interesting features and resources on Rock’s Backpages, or give an example of one or two. Anything particularly innovative or something that would surprise users?

I think the innovation lies simply in the aggregation – that we've pulled all these writers and publications together under one roof and made the articles easily searchable and navigable. The audio library is something we started building in parallel about four years ago.

What kind of people use Rock’s Backpages?

Students, teachers, writers, film researchers – and true fans!

How does one subscribe? What do they get for their subscription?

Go to "Subscribe" on the RBP nav bar. Subscriptions for individuals start at $36 for six months. For group subscribers (universities, colleges etc), it varies according to the size of the institution.

Tell me about your blog on the site and some of the other Writers Blogs.

We only recently introduced the blogs but they've been taken up by a good number of our writers who find it a welcome forum for the airing of their views. There have been some wonderful posts by the likes of John Pidgeon that we've repurposed as RBP pieces in the library. John wrote a brilliant account of interviewing Michael Jackson about a week ago before Michael died and the piece absolutely caught fire. I like to post about anything that occurs to me, mainly music-oriented but not necessarily.

What is the future of Rock’s Backpages?

Essentially that the library will continue to grow, steadily and patiently. I hope it gets to 100,000 articles in my lifetime. We will build our subscriber base significantly in the coming five years, adding to the large number of group subscribers we have. We also hope to build our licensing and syndication business on the side.