All About Jazz's Year in Review: 2010

2010 proved to be another highly productive year for All About Jazz as we further expanded our award-winning platform to reach a greater jazz audience and developed new tools to help jazz artists promote their music to our readership.

For our readers/members, AAJ continued to deliver daily news and coverage, we improved site functionality and we celebrated our 15th anniversary online with a relaunch. Our goal was to simplify AAJ navigation, and we made great strides by incorporating more CSS, XHTML and javascript. Expect more enhancements in early 2011 as we roll out a new user friendlier navigation bar.

Looking back, the list of achievements were significant. We remained inspired in spite of economic challenges, we brought new people on board, and we maintained our momentum by rapidly developing and releasing new features: we introduced single track reviews; made a greater commitment to record label profiles (13 total); introduced several new columns; launched our store at shop.allaboutjazz.com; introduced a private message feature; created more RSS feeds and widgets; recruited Bill King as the photo gallery editor and Steve Provizer as the advertising sales rep; we launched a news syndication service; we placed a local calendar on every page; we added several new features to the musician center; we added new directories to the GUIDES section; we partnered with JazzRadio.com and currently offer 27 channels; we helped launch a new jazz industry organization called the Jazz Forward Coalition; we parted ways with the two remaining print newspapers that used our name; we won our 9th consecutive Jazz Journalists Association jazz award; we introduced more sharing through the Facebook "Like" button, the Twitter "Tweet" button, and the Meebo "share" bar; and we launched a much-needed fund drive.

In terms of milestones: Managing Editor John Kelman had his 2,000th article published (incredible!); we topped 6,000,000 MP3 downloads; we published our 10,000th article and our 27,000th CD review; we topped 27,000 musician profiles, 100,000 MY AAJ registered users and 50,000 gallery images; and we celebrated our 15th year of presenting jazz on the web.

Looking ahead, we have lots of goodies in store. We'll expand our New York coverage, we'll introduce both audio and video features, and we'll kick off a series of mobile app projects starting with a global jazz calendar.

2010 was an exciting year, but we have an equally good feeling about 2011 as we further expand and more tightly integrate the web site and build a greater, more informed, jazz community.

As always, we'd like to hear your feedback on how we're doing. If you have an idea or suggestion, please send it to us.

Here's to a prosperous 2011!

Michael Ricci
All About Jazz Founder