About Seen and Heard
Seen and Heard International: Brief History and Readership Statistics – February 2011 onwards (BK)
Seen and Heard International is the live concert and opera review section of MusicWeb International which is probably the most longstanding and most comprehensive online classical music review magazine in the world. Based in Coventry UK, MusicWeb started up in 1995 as Classical Music on the Web and very rapidly established itself as an important source of high quality reviews for classical music recordings. Currently MusicWeb publishes about 10 new disc reviews every day of the week.
Seen and Heard – as it was then – began in 1999 as a response to the falling numbers – and limited scope – of classical music reviews in the UK’s broadsheet newspapers. Under Founder Editor Peter Grahame Woolf’s leadership which included the publication of his seminal article Only A Website, initially Seen and Heard concentrated almost entirely on events in London. After PGW’s departure to start up Musical Pointers in 2001, Seen and Heard gradually extended its reporting to almost the whole of the UK in response to readers’ requests for wider coverage. After further episodes of expansion, we now cover the entire output of the UK’s five major opera companies and many of the important concerts by all of our major orchestras together with concerts by significant visiting musicians, events from the music colleges etc. We also review from the important summer music festivals in the UK egs: Aldeburgh, BBC Proms, Buxton, Cheltenham, Edinburgh International Festival, Garsington, Longborough, Three Choirs and the Oxford Lieder Festival to mention only a sample. So far as we know, Seen and Heard was the only organisation to report every round of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competitions in 2007 as well as significant elements of the 2009 competition.
Since we now have reviewers in almost every country in Europe, including Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic States as well as in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. - some 60 contributors in total - we changed our name to Seen and Heard International in 2008/9. We also report routinely from 10 venues in the USA, from Canada and Argentina and we cover most of the major European and American summer music festivals such as Bayreuth, Salzburg, Aix en Provence, Pesaro, Tanglewood, Glimmerglass and Aspen as well as other significant venues throughout the year.
Seen and Heard International publishes 25 – 40 new reviews, articles and interviews each week - all of which are indexed by Google within three or four hours of appearing online. All of our opera reviews are routinely syndicated by the ’Opera Critic’ web site (www.theoperacritic.com).
In the last 12 months, 96,000 visitors visited MusicWeb International more than 200 times and in addition a further:
56,000 visited more than 100 times
63,000 more than 50 times (approx once a week)
67,000 more than 25 times
59,000 more than 15 times
60,000 more than 10 times (approx once a month)
Real Time Online Visitors at 15.47 hours UK Time August 15th 2011
Bill Kenny
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Consulting Editor
Seen and Heard International Live Opera and Concert Reviews
MusicWeb International.com
