Vampster
The online music magazine vampster was founded in 1999 with the aim of building an independent and comprehensive reference work on the Internet for fans of heavy music. In addition to bands from the metal and hard rock sectors, artists from hardcore , punk and independent are also included in the magazine.
On May 2, 1999, the former “Musikforum” SysOps of the Internet provider CompuServe Andrea Veyhle, Andreas Fischer and Markus Veyhle as well as the Swiss programmer Alexander Schmid started with vampster.com. 2001 was followed by a visually and technically revised version, 2004, further improvements were like a RSS - web feed integrated into the magazine. This year there will be an extensive relaunch of the site.
More than 20 music lovers from Germany , Austria and Switzerland are currently working on vampster on a voluntary basis. The magazine, which began as a small fanzine , now reaches more than 500,000 visitors a month with around 6 million page views, making it one of the most visited addresses in this music branch.
The main focus is on a daily updated editorial section, consisting of news from the scene , detailed interviews , CD reviews , glosses , concert and festival reports and an event calendar. Even serious topics in the form of comments on politics , religion or society have their place in the Evil residence at vampster. Registered readers can help shape the magazine and communicate with like-minded people within the community .
In addition to working on the magazine, vampster organizes an annual concert in Stuttgart with “Banging The X-Mas Tree” and presents well-known festivals in the metal scene such as the Wacken Open Air near Hamburg , the Bang Your Head Festival in Balingen or the Doom Shall Rise in Göppingen .
The archive of the music magazine vampster offers unrestricted access to over 20,000 articles on around 7,500 bands, which can be accessed via various categories and a search function.