Exclaim! is a monthly Canadian music magazine that features in-depth coverage of new music across all genres with a special focus on Canadian and cutting-edge artists. Content is based on the monthly print publication, which publishes 9 issues per year, distributing over 103,000 copies to over 2,600 locations across Canada. The magazine has an average of 361,200 monthly readers. Their website, exclaim.ca, has an average of 675,000 unique visitors a month.
History
Exclaim! began as a discussion among campus and community radio programmers at Ryerson's CKLN-FM in 1991. It was started by then-CKLN programmers Ian Danzig and Ron Anicich, together with other programmers and Toronto musicians. The goal of the publication was to support great Canadian music that was otherwise going unheralded. The group worked through 1991 to produce their first issue in April 1992, with monthly issues being produced since. Ian Danzig has been the publisher of the magazine since its start. Anicich was the magazine's founding editor, and was succeeded in 1995 by James Keast. The magazine had no official name for its first year of operations, with only the !*@# logo appearing on the cover, and introduced the name Exclaim! after Danzig realized that its growth and appeal to advertisers were being limited by a reader tendency to refer to it as Fuck. Similarly to an alternative weekly newspaper, the magazine is distributed as a free publication at campus and community radio stations, bars, record stores, libraries, and coffee shops, although home mail delivery is also available. With Chart's decision to cease publication of its newsstand edition in January 2009, Exclaim! is now Canada's only nationally distributed general interest music magazine still operating as a print publication. Danzig has attributed the magazine's survival in part to the fact that the internet ushered in an era of "free culture" in the late 1990s, meaning that the magazine never had to change its existing business model or alienate readers by introducing paywalls.
Website
The magazine's website features reviews, interviews and profiles, some of which are not found in the print publication. It includes a news page that is updated with the latest in music and music-related culture. The site reaches over 675,000 unique users every month. It also features Exclaim! TV, which includes regular instalments of video interviews with musicians, as well as a streams section featuring new albums, EPs, singles, music videos and full performances. In recent years, exclaim.ca has increased its film coverage, covering festivals, such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival, and the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, and publishing interviews with a number of high-profile directors and movie stars. Its comedy section, similarly, focuses on profiles and interviews with established and up-and-coming stand-up comedians. As well as music, exclaim.ca reviews films, concerts, comedy specials, and live comedy. The magazine's website also has contests where readers can enter for a chance to win various music and film-related prizes.
Contributors
Many notable writers have worked for Exclaim! over the years, including Canadian radio personality Matt Galloway, Canadian punk chronicler and new media personality Sam Sutherland, hip-hop scribe and CBC Music producer Del Cowie, published author Andrea Warner, Canadian editor at The FADER Anupa Mistry, filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, and award-winning DJ and author Denise Benson.
Covers
Some of the artists who have graced Exclaim!’s cover over the years include:
In February 2009, Exclaim participated with CBC Radio 3 and Aux.tv to launch X3, a new collaborative cross-promotional platform which sees all three outlets air or publish feature content spotlighting a particular "Artist of the Month". These artists were featured on the cover of Exclaim's monthly issue. X3 artists of the month included K'naan, Malajube, Thunderheist, Japandroids, Apostle of Hustle, You Say Party! We Say Die! and The Rural Alberta Advantage. Since 2012, senior editor Stephen Carlick produces a week-in-review segment for !earshot 20, a nationally syndicated campus/community radio program available through the National Campus and Community Radio Association and produced by CFMH-FM in Saint John, New Brunswick. Staff writer Calum Slingerland took over producing the segment in 2017.
