XLR8R Closed Up Shop, and Nobody Really Noticed

a.k.a. Once one of electronic music's most vital media outlets, the publication quietly paused its editorial operations last month.

Do you ever check up on your old employers, just to see what they’re up to?

I think it’s a pretty common practice among journalists, and during the past decade, I’ve made a point to periodically take a look at XLR8R, an electronic music publication where I worked from 2008 and 2015 and for several years served as Editor in Chief. Over the years, those visits became less and less frequent, but last weekend, I decided to pull up the XLR8R website and came across an unexpected piece of news:

The publication had not only closed down its subscription service last month, but had also indefinitely paused operations for its entire platform.

Another one bites the dust.

In truth, it wasn’t wholly surprising that XLR8R had effectively closed up shop. The site had become a virtual ghost ship in recent years, with new content offerings becoming increasingly sporadic and virtually everything on the site being published without bylines, instead being nebulously credited to “XLR8R Staff.” Even among industry professionals, it’s long been unclear who was actually working at the publication, and among the reading public, the site’s relevance had dramatically waned, to a point where the above-referenced closure announcement—which was published on December 11—has gone virtually unnoticed online. When I myself came across the news a few days ago, I did a quick Google search to see if I’d missed any sort of conversation about the matter. It turned up exactly zero mentions of XLR8R’s closure, and a cursory check of Twitter, Instagram and Reddit was similarly unfruitful.

XLR8R was founded more than 30 years ago, and for a good chunk of its run was one of the most important / influential publications in all of electronic music. When the publication was sold to Buzz Media in 2012, the news was deemed important enough that coverage appeared in Billboard, Adweek and a number of other media outlets, many of which had little interest in niche electronic music. That luster had obviously faded in recent years, and as a former employee, I’m admittedly a bit more attached to XLR8R than most people. That place was where I first made my name as a music journalist, and keeping its editorial afloat during the years I was there—a period that actually included two different ownership changes and layoffs that over time eliminated approximately 90% of the staff—required a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears. As such, it’s only natural that XLR8R’s closure would provoke a few pangs of nostalgia-tinged sadness in my gut, but irrespective of my own sentimentality, it’s striking that the publication’s demise has been met with silence.

Actually, it’s worse than silence, as it seems that nobody even noticed.

What’s perhaps even more worrisome, however, is how routine the closure of publications like XLR8R has become. It was less than a year ago that I wrote about similar upheaval at FACT, which had ended its long-running mix series and laid off what little remained of its music editorial staff. (Although the publication has not yet officially closed, the last issue of its supposedly biannual print magazine was issued in 2023 and the FACT website is bereft of new content.) Those developments did at least prompt a few news stories to be written and a few remembrances to circulate on social media, but even then, the general public response was a disappointed shrug. I suppose that’s better than no response at all, but what matters is that at some point, the disappearance of an electronic music publication, even one that had at one point played a major role in documenting and shaping the culture, ceased to be a very big deal—or, in the case of XLR8R, any sort of deal whatsoever.