Stop The Noise - Electronic Music Blog (2009)

Name: Stop The Noise.fr

Years: 2009 - 2014

Location: Toulouse, France

We’re in 2009.

MySpace is as its peak, everyone has an iPod or a small MP3 player with hundreds of songs they got from popular software such as eMule and Limewire or directly from their friends as we all used to be online on MSN Messenger after school.

Two of the best things MySpace implemented back then were the ability to use HTML and CSS to customize your own profile and to be able to select 8 of your friends to create a Top 8 on your profile. While YouTube was a thing back then, it was mostly funny videos that people shared just for fun. Music channels were just a few on the platform and the YouTube algorithm was very barebone. We didn’t have artificial intelligence or Spotify to get personalized music recommendations and MySpace along with other music blogs thrived during that era.

With my friends, we shared with each other a lot of music on MSN Messenger, we read music blogs, and I used the Top 8 feature of MySpace to discover a lot of artists. If my friends and I had the same music taste, maybe there was an opportunity to share my discoveries with a lot more people.

In June 2009, I bought the stopthenoise.fr domain name and I self-hosted a blog on Wordpress. I immediately started to write a lot of articles and at that time, music labels and artists gave you their approval to make downloadable one or two tracks of an LP (album) or EP. What started as a small blog to share music with my friend’s friends became a blog widely known in some cities (Toulouse, Paris, etc) and later all over France in the electronic music space. I wrote hundreds of articles, interviewed Busy P, Etienne de Crecy, Danger, What So Not, The Glitch Mob, and went to hundreds of shows.

The site grew exponentially but the amount of work did too. After school, from 6PM to midnight, Stop The Noise (or STN) was the only thing I worked on. Including weekends and holidays.

In 2011, a Googler played a video that I uploaded on YouTube (a track from Tron Legacy) as a countdown a few minutes before launching Google+. In 2014, a bit more than 6 months after I got my master’s, I moved to Paris to work at Renault/Nissan as Junior Project Manager and had no longer the time to maintain the site.

Today, the website is still online and it might make a come back someday.

• Daily visits: 5,000
• Facebook: 10,000 fans
• YouTube: more than 5 million views
• Wordpress / OVH / MySpace / YouTube / Twitter / Google+ / Facebook