Behind the absolute scenes

The most popular stories on NZ music history website AudioCulture during its first decade haven't always been about our biggest stars.

- RUSSELL BROWN

AudioCulture - Iwi Waiata turns 10 years old this month. In its first decade, the New Zealand music-heritage website published 2000 pages and profiled nearly a thousand artists, groups and industry players. But the article read more times than any other probably isn't what you'd expect.

In October 2014, AudioCulture published Mike Hollywood's history of Wellington nightclubs, from the first discos in the early 1970s, through to the boom in contemporary dance music 20 years later. The title Wellington nightclubs in the 1980s - was prosaic in the extreme, but it did well in its first month online - and then the next month, and the one after. Month after month, these memories of DJs, dancing and dodgy bouncers turned up at the top or thereabouts of the site's traffic data.