Musical Traditions Internet Magazine began out of a sense of pride and disappointment on my part.  I had written an article, of which I was rather proud, on the dance tradition of Ponte Caffero in northern Italy.  It was due to be published in Musical Traditions No.13, some time in 1995/96 ... and I was greatly disappointed when the Editor decided to cease publication after No.12.

Musical Traditions had been a paper magazine covering many aspects of traditional music and traditions having some associated musical content.  Its coverage was not limited to any one country or continent, and reflected the interests of its editor and contributors.  It was the most recent in the noble line of privately produced British publications in this field; one might mention Ethnic (started 1959), Abe's Folk Music (mid '60s ?), Traditional Music (1975) - there were surely others too ...

Musical Traditions was first published by Keith Summers in 1983 and was the longest lived, running to 12 editions before folding in late 1994.  Its content was wonderfully varied, ranging from the Tommy Talker Bands of the West Riding in No.1, to Christmas Sports in St Kitts-Nevis in No.12, and touching on the more well known Seamus Ennis, Walter Pardon, Coppers, John McKenna, Johnny Doughty, Dennis McGee, Junior Crehan and Lucy Farr (to name a few) in between.  The subjects of its articles spanned the world, taking in Africa, West Indies, Ireland, USA, Hawaii, The Ukraine, France, Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Greece, Australia, Samarkand, Mexico and Armenia, as well as the UK.  Its Record Review section was even more wide ranging.

In addition, it published two superb Supplements in association with Veteran Tapes and Topic Records - John Howson's Many a Good Horseman book/double cassette, and Reg Hall's I Never Played to Many Posh Dances book/double LP.

But MT failed due to the financial burden of paying for a print run of 1000 copies, followed by the problem of trying to sell them all, mostly in Britain.  It was also unfortunate that Keith was plagued by a series of domestic catastrophes which reduced the amount of spare time he had to devote to the undertaking.

After MT's greatly lamented demise, it was less and less likely that people interested in the traditional aspects of 'folk music' were able to find much of interest to read about in the music publications of the day.  It was also obvious that there had been quite a lot of stuff which might have been sent to MT if it had still been extant, or might be rejected by fRoots or other mainstream magazines as being too limited in appeal - or not submitted for that reason - which would have had no real chance of being published at all.  Articles, pamphlets, work-in-progress, even whole books ...

How I got into HTML:

I suffered from a relatively mild form of dyslexia - to the extent that I hated Christmas and birthdays because of the several 'thank you' letters that I had to write.  But I soon found that reading and writing on the computer was so much easier than by hand, and the spell-check quickly improved my poor spelling - to the extent that I was soon writing letters of several pages, just for the fun if it!

I also got involved, along with my friend Alan Lamb, in Name Accordeons - importing Saltarelle accordions and selling them in the UK and Ireland.  The old Amstrad had soon passed away and been replaced by a succession of early PCs running Tasword for PC (computers, despite being quite expensive back then, never lasted for very long).  In those days, PCs ran not Windows, but Microsoft MS-DOS - DOS stood for disc operating system.  Nobody I asked, including the school's Head of IT, had the faintest idea how it worked, so it really was one of those 'read the manual' moments (see Part 1) ... all 668 pages of it!  Anyway, the computer helped enormously with the business paperwork.  Setting up a website was the next step, and had just got started when a larger music company from 'up North' swooped in and took my dealership away - but I did continue doing some very basic HTML coding, for interest's sake.

So it was that, in 1996, I approached Keith Summers with the idea of reviving Musical Traditions as a 'virtual' magazine on the Internet, where material could be presented quite simply, at very little cost.  In homage to Keith and all his work in the area over the years, I wanted to retain the name 'Musical Traditions' for the e-zine, and I was very pleased when he agreed to become its assistant editor.

Musical Traditions Internet Magazine:

The magazine was initially published within my AOL account, under the 'mustrad' screen name (names were limited to 8 characters back then).  This gave us a limited amount of space - allowing for several main articles with graphics, plus news and comment, reviews etc.  It was intended that, when the space was filled, the next new article would replace the oldest - giving the magazine a sort of RORO format.  I subsequently found that more space was available through AOL and later, much more through other ISPs - so in the end nothing has ever been removed and all the published content is still available on the site.

To begin with, virtually the entire content of the ill-fated No 13, including my treasured Ponte Caffero article, was available at the site - somewhat ahead of schedule - on Christmas Eve 1996.  Subsequently, new Articles, a considerable number of News and Comment pieces, and scores of record and book reviews were added.  Our readership reached almost 2,000 on the AOL site.

Briefly - Musical Traditions Magazine was launched and was a success.  It was possible to include many more photos than was the case with the paper magazine, and many of them were in colour.  Reviews were up-to-the-minute, often appearing only a week or two after the CD's publication date.  But the real revolution, which made the move to the new medium such a step forward, was sound.

Through a combination of helpful advice and pure good luck, I found a way to include reasonable quality sound clips within our Articles and Reviews.  What's more (and far more to the point) we were able do it without undue expense - certainly nothing like the £1000 or more that it initially seemed we'd need to pay.

Sadly, there was a down-side.  Even the Real Audio sound files we were using were pretty large and it was obvious that my AOL web site would soon be full up.  We really needed to get ourselves a proper site of our own, with plenty of space, maybe our own domain name ...

I tried all the obvious sources of funding, but without success.  Either we were not considered to work in the appropriate 'local' area, or we didn't want enough money!  So - I was reduced to asking anyone I could think of with a serious interest in traditional music whether they could come up with a donation, however small, to help with the good work.  Astonishingly, almost £1000 materialised within a month from the Friends of MT.  It would be both a courtesy and a pleasure, to name and publicly thank them:

Then U-Net Ltd agreed to provide us with a 30Mb site for the price of a 5Mb one and, in September, only eight months after having first started, the new site at mustrad.org.uk came into being.  Our readership exceeded 10,000 on the new site in the first year.  The original AOL site was closed down at the end of 1997.

U-Net provided us with this sponsored site for two years, during which time the readership grew to well over 1,500 per month.  The magazine contained 40 main articles, 12 shorter Enthusiasms pieces, 2 complete books, hundreds of reviews, the complete Topic Records discography, a new and ongoing Recorded Traditional Music discography, 14 pages of news, a huge Links directory, over 500 photos and almost 450 sound clips on the site.

But in September 1999, having recently been taken over by a multi-national ISP, U-Net decided that we'd had enough help and sent me a bill for £700 for the next year's service, just 4 days before our contract expired!  Since this sum was completely beyond our reach, I had a hectic 3 days' work (not to mention sleepless nights) finding another ISP and modifying and uploading the entire site before U-Net closed the existing one down.  Fortunately it was all accomplished with a few hours to spare, and no reader had a break in service.

In November 2002 much the same thing happened again (this time due to heavy traffic - too many readers!), resulting in yet another move.

Our new site, hosted by 1&1, now houses (February 2020) a magazine containing 327 main Articles, 86 shorter Enthusiasms articles, over 1,200 Reviews, the Topic Records discography, the Recorded Traditional Music discography, 47 pages of News & Comment, 34 Letters pages, a huge Links directory, over 4,000 photos and over 2,000 sound clips.  The text element alone is equal to around 8,000 A4 pages.

This material was accessed by quite a large number of readers - over 1.7 million individual visitors in 2011.  How things have changed by 2019!

We also provided a CD-ROM based version of the magazine, to readers without Net access, or those wishing to save on hard drive space.  This was suspended in 2012, since most readers now had broadband and the CD-ROMs sales diminished to single figures.

MT is a multiple award winning publication: we have had awards of excellence from Links2Go, Web Feet, Schoolzone, and Popular Websites Award.