We started out in 2009, reviewing albums bought with our own money, as every music fan should do, and we still keep doing so fairly often, moved by an unstoppable passion for extreme and socially unacceptable sounds. Over the years we carved out a niche for ourselves in the crowded webzine world, publishing daily original contents and nothing else. No clickbaiting, no translated press releases: everything you can read on our website is the result of hours of listening and research.
Aristocrazia has always been no-profit: no one here has ever seen a dime for all the effort thrown into this project (and it’s been a huge effort, believe us), but we still believe deeply in the usefulness of metal-related articles to find one’s way among the uncountable releases that flood the market each day, and to discover some hidden underground gems.
This is why we accept physical copies only, except for specific situations we examine one by one: self released albums, extremely limited editions or digital-only releases. We ask bands, labels and agencies that contact us to send over a copy of the album they want to be reviewed on our site.
The writing of an article, if done correctly, is time consuming and demands a lot of effort and, for passionate collectors, a cd or a vinyl is not only the best source material to start writing, but also a great reward for the job done.
Our staff is tiny and drowning with all the review requests of digital stuff, and Aristocrazia doesn’t want to be a platform for those who want to take advantage of our work, accomplished in our free time, to advertise their releases for free. We’re not asking for hundreds of physical promos, we don’t need them and we would never ask for an album without the certainty of having it reviewed. In over ten years, not a single copy has been left behind and not one out of thousands of bands we wrote about ever had a reason to complain.
Finally, we remind all the bands, labels and agencies that this is a metal-related webzine, but we take into consideration requests for every genre, from classical music to pure electro, depending on the writer’s personal tastes and availability. These same criteria also drive us whether to accept or not a request: we always prefer quality in our contents over mere quantity. If we happen to decline your request, don’t take it personally.
Please send all your requests to lodge-at-aristocraziawebzine.com. We can’t guarantee a reply, because luckily there are so, so many of you, but we promise we will do our best. Have a nice read and listen,
The staff