2025 is the year in which MusicWeb achieves a significant milestone; it is thirty years ago that I founded the site, way back in 1995.

I hope I will be forgiven for blowing my own – and MusicWeb’s – trumpet. Over these thirty years we have diligently presented reviews of extremely high quality, unmatched in quantity by any other site. We are the number one site, with 61,000 CD reviews to date and multitudes of articles, and are immensely proud of all that. I am immensely grateful to all the contributors to MusicWeb, both past and current, whose efforts have enabled us to achieve all this. My particular thanks go to my management team of David Barker, Ralph Moore, John Quinn and Jonathan Woolf on whose strong support I rely so much.

I thought I would retire from MusicWeb when I was 70 but here I am at 83 still going strong (well, slightly weaker than before). Looking back on the early years I want to acknowledge the late Ian Lace who founded Film Music on the Web and was an early classical reviewer; also the late Peter Grahame Woolf who founded Seen and Heard, our live concert and opera site, now hived off and run diligently and successfully by Jim Pritchard. A dedicated reviewer who died all too young was Tony Duggan whose notable Mahler surveys continue to this day to get the biggest number of hits year after year; Tony’s surveys are now gradually being updated by Lee Denham and others. I also remember with gratitude  other significant  contributors who are no longer with us, such as Bob Briggs, who survived by selling second-hand books, and Brian Wilson who was always authoritative as befits a headmaster and to whom I could turn for any problems with Latin. Happily, the Founding Editor, Rob Barnett, is still very much with us. I always suspected he dined on dictionaries and thesauruses because every review he wrote seemed to bring new words into play that would send me scurrying to the dictionary; Rob’s reviews continue to be popular and respected

In an anniversary year such as this it’s right to look back and to thank those who have made MusicWeb the success it is. But we should also look forward. We have a strong team of over 60 reviewers. I’ve been especially pleased that we’ve added more new recruits than ever in 2024. It’s just as well, because the flow of new releases for us to appraise shows no sign of abating. Over the thirty years that MusicWeb has been in existence, several pundits have predicted, at various times, the impending demise of the classical recording industry. In fact the contrary is the case; we usually receive for review around 200 new recordings every month – sometimes more. We’re most grateful to very wide and diverse range of labels who regularly invite us to review their releases. The breadth of repertoire that is being recorded is, I think, wider than ever and music lovers can now explore areas of the repertoire that were largely neglected when MusicWeb began. Furthermore, it seems to me that the standard of performance and of engineering has never been higher. So, as MusicWeb enters its fourth decade I see many reasons for optimism.

I’ve deliberately left to last the most important thank you of all. All of us at MusicWeb are hugely grateful to our readers. Our visitor numbers are stronger than ever and give us the best possible assurance that you value what we produce. If it were not for our readers there would be no point in continuing but the fact that so many people from all over the world visit our site every day gives us great confidence. Thank you for your strong and consistent support of MusicWeb    

Len Mullenger, Founder of MusicWeb International