About
LPLive (http://lplive.net), or LPL in short, is a fansite for one of the most successful bands of the decade, Linkin Park. LPLive continues to be the most comprehensive concert guide for the band, with everything one might need in exploring the performance history of Linkin Park and their side projects (Fort Minor, Dead By Sunrise, Stone Temple Pilots, Julien-K, and more). Covering news for the band as well, LPLive connects fans to the band and vice-versa each and every day. With around 60,000 unique worldwide visitors each month, over 93,000 social media followers, we reach a large portion of Linkin Park's hardcore and casual fanbase. Our following on Twitter and Facebook alone is over 40,000 each.
Created by Mark Terrell and Jonas Breunig in spring 2006, the site was originally created as a live guide for Linkin Park, so that traders and collectors of the band’s live material would have an accurate source of information about the band’s performance history. Over the years, the site has expanded to cover the news for the band and to incorporate its own community with over 7,000 members.
As of May 2014, LPLive is one of the top two Linkin Park fansites in the world and leads with the most social media followers in the digital world. To see achievements (including mentions, press, releases, interviews, and more) of the website, click here.
Content
The live guide portion of LPLive lists every single known show that Linkin Park has played in their career. Each show for which information is available has its own page with a setlist and details of known live recordings (soundboard, webcast, audience recordings, etc). The show pages include facts unique to that show, such as if a song was played for the first time or if a guest joined the band on stage. If something special happened during the show, expect to find it there. All intros, outros and changes to the way songs are played (anything different from the album versions) are listed next to the setlists.
Year pages provide easy access to the shows, listing each tour the band has embarked on and how long it lasted. Easy to follow icons and coloring on the page explain if a show has a setlist, a recording, ticket stubs, and more in the guide. All live releases are also covered.
Under the “Related Acts” tab, you can see all of the other side projects and bands that the site covers as well, including Mike’s Fort Minor project, Chester’s Dead By Sunrise project, Chester singing with Stone Temple Pilots, and more.
New in 5.0 – a wiki tab now provides easier access to “tour summaries”, “downloads”, and compiles all of our lists and indexes of varying sorts in one easy-to-find location.
History
With a substantial amount of fansites covering Linkin Park’s early years due to their sudden and major success, there were plenty of places to get news on the band. However, information was lacking about the band’s live history. Putting his plan together in mid 2006, Mark Terrell (Hahninator) began working on a website where fans could contribute accurate details on Linkin Park shows in order to form a database that could be updated in real-time. After months of amassing data, The Linkin Park Live Guide launched on September 16, 2006 with nothing more than rudimentary white pages and text documents for each show. The seed was planted.
Immediately wanting to improve the quality of the site, Mark enlisted the help of Jonas Breunig (AndOne) and Serhii Litnevskyi (SergSlim) and the team set out together to create an improved version of the site. Jonas had a listing of previous Linkin Park tour dates and both audience & professional recordings of the band, which proved to be very useful. With countless hours put in by Serhii and a much-needed visual overhaul by Calum Scorgie (Shadowfax1007), the site was ready. Lead by a multinational team and a greatly improved website, Linkin Park Live 2.0 launched on October 22, 2007 with a brand new domain name - LPLive.net, the first time that the site would be referred to as LPLive.
Moving forward, in April 2007, Mark was contacted by Sebastian Sobotta, the creator of a precursor live guide for the band that made its debut in 2001. Sebastian offered to merge his older guide (which covered years 2000 through 2003) with the more current project and the offer was accepted. Armed with Sebastian’s work (from his and Omar Osatch’s guide), Jonas’s lists, and the ForfeitTheGame archive by Pete Crewdson (Crewdy), the information on the site easily doubled.
With the new “Minutes To Midnight” world tour kicking off in early 2007, for the first time in the band’s history, fans had the ability to view each and every setlist hours after the show ended. This was the first world tour for the band to feature a setlist from each and every show that was played!
In June 2008, the site was upgraded to its 3.0 format with the addition of community forums and for the first time – registered users. Traffic to the website continued to rise. Unfortunately, the site was hit with some internal issues (growing pains) and was forced to downgrade back to 2.0. With a brand new forum (the one still active to this day), LPLive quickly rebounded.
Planning and work began on the next version of the website shortly afterwards. LPLive 4.0 launched on June 18, 2010 and introduced a new layout, interchangeable themes and more. Both show pages and year pages were completely revamped to show more information, and galleries were placed on show pages to start a collection of ticket stubs, setlist pictures, posters, wristbands and more from the band’s shows.
Development of the current 5.0 version of LPLive began on July 7, 2011 and culminated on launch day, May 20, 2014. The fifth iteration debuted an IPS Suite 3 website along with many upgrades – the largest yet. Year pages were upgraded to show as much information as possible visually (including new icons), a wiki was created to compile all of the information the site kept amassing for years, and hundreds of pages were updated with new information on the band’s touring history.
Credits
Throughout the years, LPLive has had a significant amount of contributors to the website. This is the list of some of the most important people that helped bring this website together as well as sites where inspiration was gathered from in order to present our information effectively.
- Sebastian Sobotta and Omar Osatch, creators of the first major public LP live guide, for allowing us to use a generous amount of their information.
- Antoine V. (PushingMe) for his guide of live dates for the band, which inspired Jonas’s sources guide.
- Pete Crewdson (Crewdy), of ForfeitTheGame, for the archived setlists taken from the old PushMeAway setlist project.
- Anthony Staten (Astat) for his extensive Linkin Park knowledge and for contributing more information himself than any other person throughout the history of this site. (2006-present)
- Calum Scorgie (Shadowfax1007) for graphics, layouts, coding and assorted help. (2006-2007)
- Amanda McClain for her hard work and dedication for LPLive 4.0 and 5.0. (2009-2011)
- Simon Kilmore (of Foo Fighters Live) and Rob Bokon (of DMB Almanac) for the inspiration and ideas for the site.
A full list of the Staff can be found here.
We'd love to hear from you if you have any questions, comments or would like to add information to the site. Thanks!