Ten years ago on June 29th, 2009, Basketball John (you might know him as @5kl), the founder of SLC Dunk, debuted the first Downbeat. The name was influenced by The Shums—Layton Shumway. Back in 2009, Twitter was in its infancy, Facebook was still a site on which college kids hooked up and their parents weren’t on it sharing fake news, and videos and gifs hadn’t taken over every nook and cranny of the internet.
While I wasn’t around for the conversations of how intentional the name Downbeat was for its musical implication then, I think of how important it is now to be true to what a downbeat is in music.