Who showed up

The 2015 signup roll runs a lot deeper than I knew at the time; it’s only in preparing this site I discovered how many notable people are in here.

Every account I’ve confirmed corresponds to a publicly identifiable person doing notable work in or adjacent to the scene this archive sits in. There’s a long tail of accounts I haven’t been able to identify either way; this list is a partial pull, open by default because the point is the shape of the audience, not making you read a phone book. Richard signed up too, the second account on the system after my own, to give his OK before launch.

A natural cutoff: the FACT voting-site piece ran on 21 July 2015 and was the first press to cover the voting site itself rather than the broader SoundCloud dump. Vice, Pitchfork, Resident Advisor, Quietus and Exclaim followed across the next ten days. Anyone who signed up before 21 July had heard about the site through WATMM, or through someone who had; signups after skew press-driven.

Within each list I’ve put the most recognisable and scene-relevant names first, then left the longer tail underneath.

Pre-press: 24 May to 20 July 2015

This is the WATMM cohort — people who found the site through the forum, the chatmm channel, or word of mouth inside that circle before any press picked it up. It’s the core audience the site was built for: the same forum regulars who’d been doing the forensic work on the dump since November 2014, plus the producers, label runners, and adjacent-scene figures who overlapped with WATMM’s orbit. Richard is in here too, the second account on the system, registered to give his OK before launch.

Post-press: 21 July 2015 onwards

Once FACT, Pitchfork and the rest ran their pieces, the signups shifted. This cohort heard about the site through music press, social shares, or the broader internet rather than the forum, and the shape of the audience widens accordingly: more established artists, more industry figures, more people who’d never been on WATMM. The scene-relevant density is still high — Aphex adjacent by definition — but the geography spreads further and the recognisable names get heavier.