Before I head off for New Year’s, another anniversary – tomorrow marks the first birthday of Elidor, NYLPM contributor Robin Carmody’s music’n’culture website. Which, obviously, comes highly recommended.

And it being the end of the year, I’ll just say that I thought 2000 was – in the end – a pretty good year for reading about music. Not on the newstands, but here on the web. At the end of last year I had about six or seven music bookmarks – now I read 3 or 4 times that number of sites regularly, and best of all most of them are writing about music from a personal, impassioned perspective, not trying to weigh stuff up and dole out points and play Proper Rock Critic. In a fragmented-market, file-sharing era, that bullshit game is over, than goodness. I know you’ve heard all this from me before, so I won’t bang on, but it’s nice to have made even the very modest contribution I have to pop talk this year. 2001 should be very, very interesting. Happy New Year!