Happy New Year from A&M Corner: 2003 Edition
Greetings, all! As I'm looking at my calendar, I see the date is Dec. 31, thus marking the end of another year at A&M Corner.
A little history lesson here first. Some of our more recent guests may not realize it, but I've actually had a website online since 1995! When Compuserve was becoming more internet-aware, I'd heard that we could get actual name-based user IDs rather than our old numeric IDs, like "71211,3370", which was my old Compuserve member ID. The deal was that anyone who created a Compuserve home page would get first crack at getting their user ID...so I went after "rudy", checking almost hourly when I was home to see when the signup form would go online. I did get to be "rudy@csi.com", and to create a web presence online, I created a spin-off from a series of jazz reviews I'd authored for Compuserve's Music/Arts Forum onto a website called Rudy's Latin Corner. This was over Thanksgiving weekend of 1995, and it only took me another couple of weeks to squeak in my first Tijuana Brass discography. Where have the past eight years gone??
After a few moves of the website to different internet providers' web spaces, I finally got my own account at a web host in Pittsburgh...Pair Networks. This was January of 1997. Since I pretty much had freedom to install any program I wanted, I first stumbled along using a standard guestbook as a way for guests to communicate. (Harry, Steve, Mr Bill and many others remember this list and first made contact there...I called it "A&M Fan Contact".) A few months later, I finally found a forum package I could configure on my own, and the A&M Corner Forum was born. As the membership grew, we migrated to this current forum system...we first went online with it in January of 2002, and took it "live" to the public a couple months later.
Since then, we're boasting over 550 members in our forum, and we've all made a lot of new friends. Us "old timers" welcome new visitors to our forum all the time, and every single new member who joins brings us a whole new perspective on A&M and the many artists that recorded for that little label from Los Angeles.
In addition to making new friends in our forum, A&M Corner is all about sharing. I'm far from being an A&M expert, but with the help of others, we can usually come up with a definitive answer from at least one of our regular members or contributors!
So with that in mind, I'm going to dispense a few words of appreciation. First of all, I'd like to thank the many thousands of visitors who find our site, either through links from other sites, via the search engines, or just plain old good word of mouth. Our site isn't perfect, it isn't complete, and it can always use improvement...but we're only human, and we appreciate your visiting the website and getting enjoyment from it, perhaps learning something new and taking away that little bit of extra knowledge. Our viewership has risen over the years, and we're striving to add even more content to our site to maintain our position as the internet's #1 A&M collector resource.
A special thanks, also, to our forum members. To the lurkers, thanks for reading...and never be afraid to speak up! We'd love some input, even if you just say "hello" and tell us what you like about our site, or what you'd like to see us do in the future. To our regular forum participants, many thanks for the entertaining and informative hours of reading I've personally enjoyed; keep on posting, and enjoy your stay! For many, A&M Corner is a home base, a place for intelligent discussions, friendship and camaraderie that seems to be lacking in this hectic world of ours.
A very special "thank you" to anyone who helps me with the daily operations of A&M Corner, no matter how big or small! To the forum moderators (Harry, Mike B., Mr Bill, the Captain, Jim McCollum, Brasil Nut, Steve Sidoruk, and LP Jim) --thanks for keeping an eye on things when my tether to the computer is broken. A special nod to our contributors also. LP Jim: thanks for updating our Album Of The Week feature...a thankless, tedious task I'm sure, but there are few people in this world whose knowledge of A&M, from the popular to the obscure, is so complete. Richard Warner: the Alpert interviews are priceless, and the exclusive Pete Turner interview was one of the better things I've read this year...gracias, amigo! Also, an honorable mention and gracious thank-you to forum member William Brown (known as "W.B.") for his many explanations of A&M's pressing sources.
My final thank you is to anyone...everyone...who helped support A&M Corner through purchases from our affiliates. We currently have four affiliations in place. GEMM is a huge database of used and new record, CD and tape sellers, a great one-stop resource for searching for those obscurities you can't find elsewhere. Sheet Music Plus is one of the internet's best resources for sheet music and other items for musicians.
My biggest affiliation, however, is with Amazon. As of 2003, I have just about been able to fund the operations with the income I make from Amazon and my other two affiliates. This includes server fees, domain registration fees, and other out-of-pocket expenses. With Amazon in 2003, we've sold almost $10,000 worth of merchandise! (Hot items have included 61 copies of Herb Alpert's Definitive Hits and 31 copies of Very Best of Herb Alpert. Amazing!) In this rough economy, we appreciate all the help we can get, and we thank everyone who's ordered anything from Amazon on our behalf!
2003 was a good year for A&M Corner, and with some coming improvements in the pipeline, 2004 should be even better. Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks again on behalf of myself and the A&M Corner staff!
Posted on Dec 31, 2003 at 1:06 am by Rudy.
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