Skipees: We offer you today an interview with LPLive Founders Hahninator (Mark), AndOne (Jonas), Dmitry, and SergSlim (Serhiy). When the site started back in 2006, these four helped along the way to make the site what it has become today.

 

A little disclaimer: we've never conducted a review like this, so it's a pretty lengthy one. What it has in length, it shares equally as an immersive read. Take a journey through the last ten years of LPLive history by reading the story.

 

 

1. Let's start where it all began: what was your role in creating LPLive (When, How, First Interactions, etc.)?

 

Mark: Linkin Park is an extraordinarily popular band. The success of Hybrid Theory and Meteora alone was massive, and many fansites existed for the band. However, there was a big problem...there was no legit, archived history of their live shows. While bios, interviews, pictures, and more could be readily found across the web, it was harder to find where and when Linkin Park had played somewhere unless you were looking for upcoming tour dates. Because of this, I decided in late 2005 to start working on an archive myself. Since the band had only toured for about five years at that point, it wasn't that difficult to gather everything. I approached Jonas and together we compiled dates from the band's website archive and quite a few fansites to form our own true guide. This project launched in September 2006, a month after the band went to Japan. The first full touring cycle we covered was for Minutes To Midnight, and thankfully so, because that's when the band started changing the setlists!

 

Jonas: What started it all was my passion to collect live recordings of the band. I got into the scene in 2003 when I got fully into the band and live recordings were what kept it interesting for me. I think it's a human desire to collect something. For some it is stamps, or baseball cards. For me it was LP live shows. I kept finding more, kept finding more people that collected and traded shows with them, learned about more shows that were out there. LP was on break for several years during that time so many old and rare shows started circulating. Then I created my first trading website to list my collection and to attract other collectors. As I amassed shows, I noticed that there were different recordings not just one recording of a show, which some failed to tell apart or had very undetailed lists in that aspect. So I started a recording guide that had a list of most of the shows that LP played until that point (compiled by a good friend that put it together from several sources, just the dates, no setlists) and I started adding which shows had a recording or not, and if there were several sources. This sources guide was the main foundation that turned into first LPLive version, when it was still called LinkinParkLiveGuide. It had a massive amount of errors due to various reasons (and sources) and it took years to get rid of most of them even when LPL 2.0 was already launched. Through trading I met Nick, Mark and many others. Many vanished over the years, but some are still around today.

 

Dmitry: My involvement with LPLive began in late 2005 when I met Mark Terrell (Hahninator) on the Fort Minor Militia discussion board. Our first conversation was about the We Major mixtape. We quickly realized we were both interested in web development. I was starting a small web hosting business and he was putting together a project called The Linkin Park Live Guide. Naturally, since I was already a Linkin Park fan, I offered to host his project and provide technical support.

 

Serhiy: I started listening to Linkin Park around early 2004. During that year I tried to find as much info about the band, as possible. I started collecting audio/video recordings of live shows. One of the site that I used for that purpose was Linkin Inside, but recordings there were unorganized and with lots of mistakes in dates, tracklists, etc. At the same time, I was using LPA forums to get most of the other info about the band, and I came across Mark there. I PMed him regarding some questions and was very excited that he answered me. We started chatting, and at some point I asked about live shows and their recordings, and he told me that he has a live guide project in his mind. He showed me first version of LPLive, which was a webpage with links to txt files for each show... I started investigating the site, comparing info with shows from Linkin Inside and other sources, and found some mistakes, typos, etc. in the guide. I started telling Mark about all of those mistakes, but he was in Koala Mode and was fixing them too slowly at that time, so at some point either I asked if I could fix them directly myself, or he was the one who suggested it, and I became editor of the LPLive v.1.0, so to say. I was very glad to be able to help the team fix the errors in the guide. Then, when we created LPLive 2.0, which was based on CuteNews and HTML based pages for each show, I often helped with HTML editing of the site, and did lots of Mass changes to many shows at once.

 

Jonas: I can't recall my first conversation with Mark but I remember he was very young at that time. I still might have the old MSN messenger logs lying around somewhere. When Mark kicked off his project that turned into LPLive I decided to join in, instead of having competing projects. You can read a more detailed history on our About page.

 

 

2. What kept you motivated to keep the site running?

 

Mark: For previous tours, you could pretty much get the setlist for one show and generally apply it to the entire tour (with a few exceptions). This changed in 2007 when the band started changing the sets. That was one big motivating factor. Where would this information exist if LPLive didn't archive it? The band rotated setlists from 2007 all the way to 2014, so it made it interesting for us. At the time, another motivating factor was the emergence of recording devices. Shows have been recorded for LP all the way back to 2000 and that's nothing new, but in 2007 we started seeing a huge surge in the amount of people filming full shows. Now, you can even go to the show and record it on your iPhone either on video or with audio. And one thing the site does is list all of these sources for fans. You can see if the show you went to has a recording, and you can find it in our forum because of how interactive the fanbase is with sharing. Both of these things were motivating factors. Also being able to readily access any show the band has ever played with a few clicks through the site is pretty cool.

 

Jonas: Seeing my first live show and meeting the band in 2007 at the Berlin Kesselhaus was a personal milestone for me and it's still one of the most special LP shows I've seen to this day. It kept motivating me seeing many more shows over the years but also meeting new people and many that I call friends that I met at shows and keep seeing again. All that through LP. But LP is also to credit that they kept being a great band, releasing albums and great music and extensive touring that kept it interesting to see them again and again and again.

 

Dmitry: The first few years of my involvement with LPLive, as I was finishing high school and starting college, I was a member of numerous discussion boards. On a couple I had talked my way up from member to moderator. I was motivated to keep the site running because I enjoyed meeting people online who shared my interests. Linkin Park fans tend to have a lot of things in common.

 

Serhiy: From the beginning of the project, I thought that it is very unique and important website with info, which you won't be able to get in other places, at least definitely not so structured and trustworthy. I was studying in the university at that time, so had plenty of free time to work with the site. With the time, as the site kept growing and getting more and more popular, I was feeling very proud and special among my Linkin Park friends that I was one of the staff members of such huge and respectable international fan website. This, and the fact that I really wanted to make the guide as perfect as possible, kept me motivated to keep the site running!

 

 

 

 

 

3. In your opinion, how has the site evolved over the years?

 

Serhiy: Looking back at the first version of the site, and comparing to what it became now makes me realize how it has evolved. Over the years the site kept growing not only in its main area of live shows coverage, but it became one of the main platforms for interaction between fans with the launch of our forums. The next huge step in the growth of the site was launch of the Wiki, with all its lists, it became another unique vault of info about Linkin Park history. I often use it myself, when I need some info found quickly and always tell newbies to take a look at it . Another branch of the evolution of the site is our constant sharing of various Exclusives. Our team works really hard to get all of the things that we released over the years and keep doing till this time!

 

Mark: Well you can probably tell that we've grown to add a LOT! I'm a little rusty on the order things have come in, but we've gone from literally a .txt file-based site to the huge database we have now, complete with thousands of pictures and images. You can probably see most of the visual upgrades, so there isn't a big need for me to discuss those. Also, we were young when we started the site. Now as we've gotten older I'll say that we make better choices about things, specifically how we word posts or how we advertise something, OR as many would say....how we handle our relations with other sites! In the Minutes to Midnight era, we started growing a community around the site. Many of those people are even still around today. One time after that touring cycle ended, the band's management made the decision to upgrade the LPU, which had a very large community built around their forums. One of the unfortunate side effects was that the forum would have to be wiped fresh to grow the fanclub. The LPU never recovered from that and it sent hundreds of fans across the web to grow the membership of LPLive, LPAssociation, and other sites at the time. This surge helped establish us in the community and while it was a sad thing at the time, it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened for us.

 

Jonas: I like how our show pages evolved over the years adding so many details about the shows.

It first started out with just setlists and show notes. Later we added recording info, more basic info about the venues, tours, supporting bands. More details to setlists like the song variations (intros, bridges etc.).

In our first site version we started up with no forum, just a simple comment feature for news and updates that we posted. Our forum community grew over the years, not massively but steadily. Building a core base of fans that are very interested in the live shows / aspect of the band which ends very often in nerdy discussions and some very interesting content such as lists with lots of info posted in the forums.

 

Mark: A really big change that I'd like to talk about for a minute started in 2008. At that time, we started to work hand-in-hand with the band's management on promotions of things whether it be tours, songs, albums, scavenger hunts, or other interactive things with the fans. No one actually knew how great this would be until it had gone on for a few months. Adam Ruehmer was solely responsible for this when he got hired by Linkin Park and he took it upon himself to build a GREAT (!) relationship with the fanbase. Emphasis on the word "great" right there, seriously. He reached out to Derek of LPAssociation and I and it grew to the point that we could text or call him 24/7/365 (sometimes really meaning that with a 4:00am text) about anything, and vice versa. If the band needed us to take something down, we of course obliged because there was a large level of trust that was established between all parties. The communication between fansites and the band's management would be almost nonexistent if it weren't for Adam. There was zero interaction at all between their management and the fans before he was hired so it was a risky move for him at the time to reach out to us. Thankfully when he moved to Warner Bros, Lorenzo carried the torch and we have a great relationship with him as well.

 

Dmitry: The site hasnt evolved much over the years because weve stuck to doing what we do best. The cores of the site, the live guide and the discussion board, function and feel the same. The biggest evolutions have been the software upgrades behind the scenes.

 

 

4. What it personally takes for you to combine your LPLive duties with your other activities? Did you ever have to sacrifice your personal time for the site or vice-versa?

 

Jonas: Way too often I'm really tired at work because I didn't sleep enough because we had to work on something the night before and discussing stuff can be hard due to the time differences. But I'm doing this for so many years now, it's almost normal at this point haha.

So I usually do my work on the site at night or on weekends. Even when I try to do some small updates or add just a few new images, that easily takes up a few hours.

 

Dmitry: Im not as hands-on as I once was so I dont contribute too much time to the site now. Though trying to imagine how many hours I spent on 5.0 during the three years it was in development makes me dizzy. Those were the days LPLive was a part-time job.

 

Serhiy: With the inception of LPLive 2.0, I started learning HTML and CSS basics to be able to edit the site and not break anything in there. So, thanks to LPLive, I invested my time into studying of what helped me make my first trading website later, and helped me in university courses, and later on in my job. I have spent many hours editing the site, as well as googling for info, which also taught me how to use Google more professionally by forming smarter queries .So yeah, I've sacrificed a lot of personal time for the site, but I can definitely tell that it was repaid a hundredfold in one way or another.

 

Mark: We have such a large staff now that it isn't a problem, but we have easily invested thousands of hours EACH into the site. People probably don't know how long we'll research something, sometimes for hours or days on end, before we make one small change to one page of the site. We try to be as accurate as possible in every single thing we do. I did spend an entire summer once on building our current wiki on the site, but other staff members dedicated very large portions of time that summer working on our current site version as well. So yes, that does take up a lot of personal time. Weve done Christmas exclusives, etc before so of course that takes personal time too.

 

 

5. The site's been around for 10 years, and you've been here since the start: do you see yourself continuing to be as invested in the site in the future as you were when it began?

 

Mark: Yes. This is one project I truly enjoy and I of course am a big fan of the band, so LPLive isn't going anywhere and I'm not going anywhere. I can assume Jonas feels the same. Life happens and things change for people, but this is an enjoyable hobby for our staff. At times, I have taken steps back when the band wasn't as interesting to me at that time. We all have tours we enjoy and we all have tours that are kind of "so-so" (the same can be said for albums), and other staff stepping up during those times really keeps things going. When the band is not touring for a year and a half, I'm sure we get uninterested for a while but we always come back to it. I've tried to really keep things going here during this latest break, which is the largest break Linkin Park has taken since the writing sessions for Minutes to Midnight. I try to run as much of the social media as possible and do a lot of forum posting too, so I don't see myself not invested in it in the future.

 

Jonas: Over the years I probably spent thousands of hours on the site and I try to invest as much of my free time as I can. I'm working on updates almost daily, at least I try to. It just never ends, there's always something to do, we have (several) to-do lists with stuff that we still need to add / fix. We don't get anything done these days without some sort of list haha. We won't run out of work anytime soon (maybe never).

When LP is touring and/or releasing new music it can get very busy but we enjoy the off time to work on fixes or new site features. LP's current break gave us some room to work on a side project that we'll reveal very soon.

 

Dmitry: My lifes changed over the past ten years. My music preferences progressed and there are more strains on my free time. However, Im too invested sentimentally and financially in this website to ever leave the LPL team.

 

Serhiy: To tell the truth, right now I rarely help with the site. There are a lot of reasons for it, but the main ones are probably that I got older, got a job, have less free time. So even now I'm not so much invested in the site, as I was before, but I hope that things will change once again, and I'll be as useful, as I was before for the site and community in whole.

 

 

6. Lots of LPLive's predecessors and contemporaries have gone down over the years; what keeps LPLive from going down, too?

 

Dmitry: Ive seen a couple predecessors and contemporaries come and go over the years, including some that I helped out. People start websites and then abandon them because they underestimate how much work is involved in realizing their ambitions. Others walk away because they either lose interest in the band or have more pressing real-life responsibilities. A few jumped on the bandwagon thinking they could actually make money. LPLive keeps going because there has always been a strong team involved who gets along and works well together. We also have a contingent of fans who have been with us for years. We owe them.

 

Serhiy: LPLive is unique website, not as many other fan websites out there. This is the main reason why it hasn't gone down over the years and probably won't go down for a long time! Of course another important reason is our subscribers, forum members, fans... Without them, their support, feedback - most of us wouldn't have the motivation to do anything. And the last, but not least in my list is our team! These people are real professionals in what they do! We had some problems in our staff family, but we overcame all of them and became even stronger team.

 

Mark: That always bothered me about sites that I liked. If you are invested in a project and it's a legit resource for people, keep it going. Do what it takes to keep it up. To answer your question, our staff is honestly too dedicated to the site for us to go down - we have such a unique group of people that work on LPLive and they work really hard. Other sites probably went down because of how much work is involved. Instead of just one or two big fans of the band running a site, we have like twelve or thirteen. While Jonas and I are involved in literally everything, we have a few people that are dedicated to smaller projects or areas of the site. When everyone is able to get along well and work on things that they enjoy, it's not really "work". You're just having fun on a project with your friends. If it ever becomes too much work for someone on a project, we take a break or bring in someone else to help. The final point is that the community is so supportive, they really help us out and they're a fresh set of eyes for everything that we are doing. I know we are all thankful for their support.

 

Jonas: I guess one reason is that we are covering an area (live shows) that most sites barely covered or not at all. There can be only so main sites covering the same stuff (news). We are doing a mix of both. But the major reason is probably our team that kept it all together for so many years. In the end it's the community that keeps us going.

 

Mark: The band continues to tour so there is always something to do, and even when LP stops touring, we'll always be around. I could legit say I don't think LPLive will ever go offline, even if some of the staff members eventually move on. One thing I'd like to mention is that we are always searching for the next big "thing". For years, we wanted a proshot recording of a 2004 show...we eventually tracked one down. We have released many shows, demos, and more to the community and the search for more is always something that's going on behind the scenes with us. That will continue for years (or even decades) after the band breaks up. Check out the Nirvana fanbase, to this exact day they are releasing older uncirculated shows and that band has been broken up for over 20 years. I see some comparisons there.

 

 

 

 

 

7. What's your favorite part or feature of the website? What are you most proud of?

 

Serhiy: There are so many features on the site that I'm proud of, that I can't pick only one. The Live Guide itself with all the additional info (recordings, show notes, photos, ticket stubs...) is the main feature, of course, in my opinion. Wiki, on the other hand, is probably my favorite part at the moment, as I have created or helped with many of its lists, which often come in handy.

 

Jonas: I'm most proud of our gallery feature. We try to add pictures to as many shows as we can but not focusing just on live show photos, like you would expect, but also lots of other stuff like tickets, posters, backstage passes, venue photos and much more.

I've started to collect images years ahead before we added this feature with the launch of version 4.0 in 2010. Currently we have close to 6,000 images in our show pages galleries, including ticket stubs for over 650 shows.

 

Mark: The wiki we have currently on the site houses a LOT of information on the band, stuff you won't find anywhere else on the web. It's pretty much a go-to for any hardcore fans of the band and their side projects. That took us months of work to put together and I feel like the end product reflects it. If you want to see something hardcore fans "obsessed" over for a very long time, check that wiki out. Lists that we were working on for years were thrown in there, quite specific things about the band. One thing I am proud of is how we have been able to evolve the year pages and show pages over the years. Pictures on the show pages was a really big deal for us and I know Jonas and Dmitry worked hard on that. The large-scale show pages were needed badly and now we have almost endless space to put as much information as we need to on the pages. If Mike feels the need to make the setlist similar to a DJ set again (like 2014), we can handle it. The year pages with the icons also have come a long way....they are very easy on the eyes now, but still provide a lot of information.

 

Dmitry: If you visit any show page there will probably be a row of photos associated with the show near the bottom of the page. If you click on one, itll pop-up full size. This is my favorite feature of the site due to the effort involved in writing the code to make it work with the new 5.0 database. I had to hire two different freelance programmers to figure it out.

 

Mark: It'd probably be no secret that one of our favorite days as staff members is when we are able to unveil something awesome to the community. A lot goes into a new project behind the scenes, whether it's a show/song release or a new feature of the site, and the day it goes public is always enjoyable.

 

 

8. If you were to list top most important events and persons that were gamechangers for Linkin

Park community, what would they be?

 

Dmitry: The other founders can probably answer this question better than me.

 

Mark: If I listed every Linkin Park fansite that inspired us and wrote about them, I would take up an entire page. "Persons" is a big part of your question. When we all think about a gamechanging person, we'd probably all mention Astat (Anthony Staten). He's been around for ages and is a true mastermind about the band. Linkin Park even honored him with a guitar a few years ago that they sent to him via their guitar tech Sean at the time. He has helped us pretty much since the beginning. Lestat, another staff member, has been a gamechanger for us too, getting a ton of information for the site.

 

Serhiy: Regarding persons in Linkin Park community, I could name a lot of people, who devoted huge amounts of time and their life to the band and community. To name a few, let's start with Astat, who, in my opinion, is the megamind! He probably knows much more about the band, than any of us and band members themselves. He was the first person, who gave me answers to my noobish questions when I was just getting to know the band. LESTAT, is another great example of dedication and professionalism. He solely provided such exclusives and information about Grey Daze, that we couldn't even imagine existed. Adam and Lorenzo could be also called gamechangers for Linkin Park community, as they did a lot of things to make LPU experience much better. nkramar, AndOne, Hahninator, Derek... there are so many people that I'd call gamechangers...

 

Mark: Once again, Adam was a massive change when it came to the relationship between the fans and the band. Also, with social media growing, the band was able to start taking a look at the site and I've received feedback from them in different ways on what we do. In regards to our staff, I'm just thankful I met people as dedicated to the site as I was at the time. One person's name that is not mentioned enough is Nick, who has played a big part in the exclusives we post. He has been behind some of the biggest things to hit the community, even before LPLive.

 

Jonas: I'm trying to limit this to people who are involved with LPLive. There are so many more and not enough space to mention them all: Nick - He's one of the major reasons LPLive is what it is today. Mostly pulling the strings behind the scenes providing so many exclusives and rarities throughout the years (even before LPLive). The LP community and LPLive community wouldn't be the same without him, without a doubt. It was a real pleasure meeting him in person first the first time 4 years ago at the Honda Civic Tour in the US, always a pleasure! Astat - He's a living LP encyclopedia. He seems to know everything. And of course his guitar tabs and videos are just legendary in the community. Lestat - He dug up massive amounts of unknown info about Grey Daze. We learned so much in the last years and he helped to find tons of live dates that were very helpful for our guide. We started out with just 2 Grey Daze shows, I think. Now we have over 80 listed.

 

Serhiy: As for most important event, I'd say it was introduction of LPU Summits, which changed how fans interact with the band. Official LPU Meet Ups are another great opportunity for fans from one area to meet each other and have some fun! I'd also mention another program, which involves fan websites, but I think I should be quiet about it for now...

 

Jonas: Events: LP launching the DSP program. Which is sadly canceled now but it was a massive help for the site. I think the release of the Hybrid Theory and Meteora instrumentals were a huge deal as well, fans wanted those ever since and it took more than 10 years to find their way to us.

 

 

9. What's been the highlight of being a founder of LPLive?

 

Mark: I've had people come up to me at shows that I've never met before, that have visited the site. That's pretty cool. Just the fact that we are able to be a resource for fans who visit the shows or want to know more about LP. Fans still come back even with the emergence of setlist.fm because they trust us and they can discuss the band here. My highlight has been meeting so many new people at shows and also making good friends on our staff that I've seen shows with. Jonas and I have seen over 20 shows together on two continents, despite one of us living in Germany and one of us living in the United States. We've had shows where a lot of the staff members were able to get together and hang out...that's fun.

 

Jonas: Traveling to shows and seeing my favorite band perform live. At this point all the stuff happening around it is almost more fun than the actual shows. Meeting friends I see only at LP shows and making new friends.

 

Dmitry: Mike Shinodas familiarity with the site when I talk to him during LPU meetups and his generosity of giving us shout outs on stage. Also, launching 5.0 was one of my proudest personal achievements. I probably spent more time on it than my Bachelors degree.

 

Serhiy: The highlight of being a founder of LPLive is probably a popularity among Linkin Park fans, who know the website People trust me, in most cases, because I represent a well-known international website about LP. Also realizing, that I helped with a project, that is now used by thousands of people is something special! I feel proud of myself

 

 

10. Is there a lot going on behind-the-scenes amongst admins that the site visitors won't know about?

 

Mark: Yes. Our email inboxes are pretty busy, especially when the band is touring or we are preparing for a release. I will honestly say behind the scenes has a lot going on for our site. That's how we plan our next move when it comes to content we are posting and how we discuss with staff a variety of things (leaks, what the band is doing next, etc.). At this point, my LPLive email inbox has almost 3.5gb of staff emails from the past few years - that's thousands of emails of planning, discussion, etc.

 

Jonas: We sometimes have and had countless, almost ridiculous discussions chatting for hours or writing tons of emails figuring out how things are done in the correct way.

For example, getting all the city names / suburbs right where the venues are actually located, when the official announcements often just listed the biggest cities nearby cities.

The same for states/provinces, a topic we picked up several times. Or if we list foreign cities with their original names or not, combined with foreign alphabets. It's really hard to keep the continuity and there are always ways to improve it.

Also all the planning that went into releasing some of our exclusives. Sometimes preparing it for months.

 

Mark: Something pretty funny about our behind the scenes with us is that things will be silent for a few weeks and I will literally send out 8-12 emails at once to the staff about a lot of different things. It's almost comical how the email inboxes will be "blown up" and someone usually comments on it. Thankfully, our core staff works VERY well together. Jonas and I in an almost weird way can sometimes predict what the other will say about something, or in another way, I can send him an idea and he looks at it completely differently than I do.

 

Serhiy: Not a lot is always going on behind the scenes, but we definitely have some things up our sleeves, that we don't tell right away. In most cases I'm not even aware of what's coming next, of our exclusives... Of course we have some discussions from time to time, which are kept private, till we decide to share it, but it's not that often, really

 

Dmitry: As I type this Im listening to something we have but cant ever release or talk about.

 

 

11. What's the most memorable story (or stories) you remember along the site's history?

 

Mark: One time, during the band's first U.S. tour in two and a half years....February 2011....our site was being transferred to a new server overnight and it broke! You'd think in 2010 we'd have backed the site up a lot, especially with the A Thousand Suns touring cycle starting, right? Nope, guess again. That slipped our minds and we lost many months of data on the site, which we had to manually rebuild from scratch. We did get it fixed a while after that but the site was down for weeks, forum and all! Suffice to say, we learned our lesson there.

 

Dmitry: The apocalypse of February 2011, when the servers hard drive was moved to a new rack but then failed to spin-up and effectively died. The only backup available was too outdated so we shipped the drive to a laboratory in California. Downtime was excruciatingly long but we were able to get back online. Always have up-to-date backups of your valuable data!

 

Jonas: Story time. We had a server crash in February/March 2011 during the ATS Tour in North America. We had to put up a temporary site while we tried to recover our lost data. It was a mess. Some info couldn't be recovered. The site was just completely broken and most of repairing had to be done by hand. So I was sitting there on my birthday, spending almost the entire day to put it all back together. But at the end of the day I was still able to get together with my family to enjoy the rest of the day.

 

Serhiy: Releases of such exclusives as MFR 2005, She Couldn't, State of The Art, Grey Daze recordings and Demos, and much much more are the most memorable. Such releases always gain a lot of attention, discussions, speculations, etc., and it's always interesting. Another story that I remember is when we were in 2.0 version - HTML pages for each show. We used to have a local copy of the website on our own PCs, which we updated from time to time, so that we had the latest copies on our own PCs. We edited our local copies, and uploaded them to Server... I can't even tell how many times some of us forgot to download the newest copy of the page before editing it, and we lost someone else's changes... It was horrible! LOL

 

Jonas: In 2009, when we released She Couldn't, it was a massive success. We had so much traffic the site was very very close to go offline for a couple of days; The MFR 2005 show release, a personal highlight for me, it took so many years to get it; Also, out of nowhere for SSMF in 2013, when Anna Shinoda helped us uncover Xero show dates. Thanks again for that.

 

Serhiy: One more interesting bit of history was when a friend of our site, Nikita, who's administrating our VK page, organized an LPLive meet up in Minsk, Belarus the day before the show. There were few cover bands, many Linkin Park fans, music... And at some point during the evening we spotted Linkin Park crew members in the same club. It was just a coincidence, that they picked the same club to relax before the show day, where we were having a Linkin Park pre-party at.

 

Mark: I also want to mention our exclusives we post. She Couldn't, an unreleased Hybrid Theory song, almost took us offline for a while. That was a really big deal at the time. I know in several ways we were sort of "late" to the scene with the Music For Relief 2005 show, but I think more work went into getting that show than anything we've ever released. It was just such a huge highlight for our staff to be able to say we finally had the show and were able to release it.

 

Serhiy: "@lplive Contrary to popular belief, none of us actually know what we're talking about. FYI" - this Mike tweet also got deep into my memories.

 

 

12. Is there anything else you would like to add?

 

Dmitry: To all the people who contributed to the site, posted in the forums, helped us moderate, gave a donation, shared LPLive with their friends, etc. THANK YOU!

 

Jonas: I'd like to thank everyone who contributed over the years. Couldn't have done it without you.

Onto another 10 years! See you at the shows.

 

Mark: I want to thank the community and fans for supporting us. We are growing more than ever right now on social media, which is crazy to me considering the band is writing a new album and isn't on tour. We aren't going anywhere.

 

Serhiy: Well, that's it, folks! I'm glad that all of you, guys, are with us! I'm extremely happy that there are people who has been with us since day one, and that there is constant increase of our followers. There's so much more to come, so stay with us and you won't be disappointed!

 

 

Thanks for reading and supporting LPLive, whether you were here from the start or you joined today. This site wouldn't be where it is without every single one of you. From us at LPLive, thank you.

 

 

Credit goes to Lestat and Soul who helped me with the interview.