Today is my birthday. I am writing this today rather than right before the new year solely because I want people to wish me a happy birthday. That said, I thought I’d write about our last year. While many considered 2016 to be a bad year and there is a plethora of evidence to support that claim, we found 2016 to be a great year. It had some bumps and rough spots along the way, but each one provided a lesson and toughened our skin. We saw some incredible festivals and shows. We met and got to listen to some fantastic artists live. We witnessed some amazing moments and we’re proud that we did it for you.
For 89% of the year or 324 days, we were known as EDM Assassin. This was originally our name since we opened up the site on April 20th 2013. On November 21st, we unveiled By The Wavs after a year of planning and months of work. There have been zero regrets and all positive remarks since the name change. These last 43 days have been very exciting to watch and learn from.
We hit many milestones this year. We were on top of the front page of Reddit and surpassed Denzel Washington’s AMA. We were also the top of numbers subreddits: /r/NFL (5,226 upvotes), /r/NBA (1,986 upvotes), /r/Hockey (901 upvotes), /r/MLS (641 upvotes), /r/MMA (350 upvotes), and many more. We were accepted as media at almost every festival we applied to cover. To be considered official press is an extreme honor that we took extremely seriously.
Onstage with the EDM Assassins was very popular. We brought out many different mixes each week. When we rebranded from EDM Assassin to By The Wavs, we ended Onstage with the EDM Assassins and started Catching Wavs. We did not want to rebrand all the old episodes, but rather start anew with the same style and format.
I want to take the time to thank everyone that has made this site possible! I want to thank our current editors – Theo and Nick. I want to thank our former editors, Tim and Nick. These four individuals have really put the team on their back and really helped out by going above and beyond.
I also want to thank all the writers that have contributed to the site in the last 3 years: Andre, Alessio, Aurelio, Chez, Adam, Brett, Brian, Corey, Erin, Collin, Andrew, Saleem, Diana, Chris, Christa, Connor, Ashlyn, Jemma, Theo, Janet, Justin, Jacob, John, Kamola, Grant, Natalie, Kelsey, Kevin, James, Lee, Linzy, Marissa, Andy, Mike, Matt, Nando, Naomi, Nate, Jennifer, Sean, Tanner, Talia, Troy, Otto, Shannon, Ty, Wendy, Luigi, Zach, and Zach. Each one of these writers have contributed at least one or (in some cases, many) more of the 7,616 articles.
As a community, we have been able to raise $1,000 for the Pulse Nightclub Fund. We have raised awareness and charity for other funds too.
For the future, we’ll be looking to do more editorial posts. We love the music and we’ve been featuring up-and-coming artists weekly all from the music submitted to the site.
We are also looking for more writers.
2016 was solid. We’re only going up in 2017 and hope you’ll be aboard for the ride!