A MetroGnome Milestone

The Gnome came trotting over this morning and told me I should take a look at the statistics on our MediaFire account.
As of this morning I am happy to say that MetroGnome has hosted 200,000 downloads. The Gnome and I never thought we'd reach so many people. We started as just another blog offering CDs that we found interesting. Our very first post was a disc of music by Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. After a while we started offering live performances from our library and that seemed to be the most popular material with visitors so we changed our content to live concerts exclusively, most of which came from our own tape collection, but some from CD-R copies and a few private CDs.
We offered a run of Bruckner symphonies featuring most of the symphonies conducted by Kubelik, Scherchen, Krips and others. The Richard Burgin 5th was the most popular of the Bruckner series and generated a lot of online interest in Burgin the conductor and led to the appearance of his Mahler concerts and a couple of interesting concerts of miscellany.
We then did a batch of Mahler symphonies of which the most popular posts were the Das Lied and Mahler 7th from Vienna by William Steinberg. Many people credit MG for spearheading the resurgence of interest in Steinberg and if that is true, it was not intentional. Good music is the only prerequisite for posting and we never wanted to become a one trick pony. We also featured more Mahler by Kubelik (at least three different performance of the 9th) and a comparison of the Cooke, Carpenter and Mazzetti completions of the 10th (soon to be re-posted). Perhaps the biggest blip on the radar was our posting of the Jascha Horenstein BPO Mahler 5, which led to at least two remastered versions being circulated on the web amidst much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
We posted a fair amount of Munch (among the most popular offerings), Ormandy (mostly overlooked by collectors of live material), Stokowski and Celibidache whose later Munich performance of the Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphosis alone enjoyed over 2,000 downloads.
200,000 downloads is a lot. Only a percentage is, of course, from MediaFire. We have had several hosting services over the years and that number is the total combined downloads of all of them. By the way, each of those posting services (with the exception of a few files on Mega) were paid, professional accounts and funded by the Progress Hornsby Foundation for the Dissemination and Appreciation of Stuff.
Thanks to those of you who sent in their comments, opinions and encouragement (WW, MR, Zsar, dgrb & others). Thanks to other bloggers who inspired me to do this and keep on doing it -- Nikolay over at Panovik, Julio at Sentidos, Novan, Shuo and others. Special thanks to Mark and to the estates of some of the artists represented here who contacted me as well. I'll even shout out to Duffy and Kado, who insist upon re-posting my material. Imitation is, after all, the highest form of flattery.
And lastly, thanks to you, Sid. We'll all miss you. I'll always be indebted to you for the Progress you made.
I'll let you all know when we hit a half a million.
-- PH