Swim Into The Stats: A Slightly-Goofy-But-Still-Informative Look Back at 2024

I’ve alluded to Swim Into The Sound’s growth a few times throughout the year, but as part of our year-end festivities, I wanted to take a beat and show that growth with actual numbers. Special thanks to Braden Allmond, one of Swim’s new writers, for all the data visualization and hard stats throughout. This one’s truly for the Numbers Heads, a recounting of the year for those who are curious about what goes into a site like this. 

To recap, at the beginning of the year, we put out a call for new writers which resulted in 54 applications, plus a few more that trickled in over the following months. This was on top of the 20-ish writers we already had on the team, so it became a real process to onboard all these new faces and get them up to speed. After this sizable influx, things really started to pick up in mid-February with an onslaught of show reviews, retrospectives, and single write-ups. I still found time to write some silly stuff, but for the most part, I was editing other people’s work as the Swim Team whipped up one fantastic piece after another. 

Fig. 1: Together, we’ve published 130 articles totaling 182,966 words. That’s equivalent to 1.5 Twilight books (Twilight is 118,975 words, and New Moon is 132,758 words. Eat your heart out, Stephenie Meyer). To me, this graph epitomizes the masthead of Swim Into The Sound: “Words on music and life.” While I hope the “life” part is woven throughout everything we publish, in 2024, our writers had the chance to see live shows, hang with artists on tour, premiere songs, and even film music videos. 

Obviously, most of these are reviews, and if you’re curious to hear everything in one place, Ciara Rhiannon (another one of this year’s excellent new writers) created this Spotify playlist with everything the site reviewed in chronological order throughout 2024. Weighing in at 984 songs and nearly 58 hours of music, if nothing else, this playlist feels like a terrific overview of the year in music and the type of bands that Swim covers. 

Whether we’re talking Real Deal Album Reviews, quarterly roundups, or long-form shitposts, that grand total of 130 articles is even more impressive when you look at it in relation to previous years.

Fig. 2: I know we are already too full of pie from the holidays, but here’s one more for your waistline before the new year. In 2024, we published more than one-quarter of all the articles Swim Into The Sound has ever posted! On top of that, we’re 75% of the way to the one-million-word mark. 

Behind the scenes, the Swim Into The Sound Discord has been a constant source of silly memes, music chatter, and genuine energy drink discussion. It’s been incredibly special to get to know all these people and even meet a few of them throughout the year. I think this next visual goes a long way to show how much the site grew in 2024 with all these new people on board…

Fig. 3: The number of individual authors SPIKED in 2024. If you sum up all unique writers from the inception of this site through 2023, it’s still less than the number of authors in 2024. 

But who are these people? Now that we have an idea of the number of people contributing to Swim, let’s examine how often they’re writing for the site and in what quantity.

*Contributions to lists, roundups, or end-of-year collections are not considered in this graph.

Fig. 4: This graph shows the number of articles written by a particular author this year. For example, the bin at “7” on the x-axis indicates that three authors wrote seven articles. This graph shows how difficult it is to turn sensible words into entertaining sentences and build those sentences into meaningful articles. Some people have a knack for it, some went to school for it, and some of us love music enough to shamelessly Google “synonyms for angular.” 

Fig. 5: Here’s one of my favorite graphs in this whole thing: Swim Into The Sound’s Yap Stat. This chart measures how much an author wrote on average per article by taking their total word count and dividing it by the number of pieces they wrote. I think this shows our penchant for verbosity and how much we love to talk about music. 

Fig. 6: If you are curious about what kind of traffic all this yapping nets us, this timeline shows our total visits on a month-by-month basis. This year was our best yet, with 81k visits from 69k unique visitors (nice), all adding up to 100k pageviews! That’s a 20% increase year-over-year, which makes total sense, especially when you factor in how much more we published this year. 

Fig. 7: We’ll discuss this plot in more detail closer to our 10th anniversary next year, but for now, marvel at its noodly glory; I think it speaks for itself.

Whether you’re refreshing the Swim home page three times a day, checking out an article a friend sent you, or a bot indexing our catalog, we’re glad you’re reading this. Thank you for supporting the work our writers do to document the music in our world and the artists who make the music we all enjoy. (You are remembering to support the artists, right?) 

It has been indescribably rewarding to play matchmaker and link writers with these upcoming albums from bands they are passionate about. Throughout the year, a fair number of writers came to me with cool albums or bands they wanted to cover that I’d never even heard of. The end result is exactly what I had hoped for: a community of people loving music and sharing that passion with each other and the world. I’m excited to see how much more things grow in 2025.