Hi! So, to close out my 10,000 views special, this is... well, a very strange post. It's the story of how my blog came to be, why I've done the things I've done with it, and some behind-the-scenes stuff you may not have known. If you've been following my blog from the start (which most of you actually haven't - if anything a lot of my current viewers were probably introduced to me in July 2023 when I went "public" through a comment on Ethan's blog), this will give a bit of further insight you may not have known. This also has some more surface-level details, mostly in the earlier parts, so newer viewers can just see an overview of what the blog used to be and how it's changed if they're interested. Anyway... now for this style of post I haven't done anything like before. Let's get into it!
(This took a long time to make, so let's just hope anyone actually sees it.)
Part I: Why I Started
I started "following" Hits 1 in mid-2019, but I wasn't keeping up with it super duper regularly. In fact, I didn't listen much during quarantine since I generally listened in the car. However, in late 2022 I started getting into popular music again and I was reintroduced to Hits 1 when I came across the year-end top 30 songs of 2022, and decided to listen to it. I'm glad I did, because if not, I definitely wouldn't have been where I am now. I started listening to the countdown every week, and one day I randomly thought, "Wow, I really want to listen to the year-end countdown of 2022 for no reason whatsoever". But I checked and it was removed from SiriusXM on demand by then, so I looked it up online to see if anyone posted it publicly.
That's when it all began. I found out that Pulse Music Board uploaded the year-end countdown and a lot of cool statistics about it, and I was already starting to think, "ok, this might be something I'd wanna do in my spare time". Then, I discovered this entire community of bloggers dedicated to Hits 1: Beluga, Hippo, Waffle, Ethan (still Zestpond at the time), etc. You know what happened next. I created my own blog. I believe it was called "Hallett's Hits 1 Weekend Countdown Reviews" or something super generic like that (the URL was halletthits1.blogspot.com, trust me, there's nothing there anymore), and I posted the year-end countdown for 2022, with my takes on the songs.
If you're an "OG" viewer of this blog, you may be thinking, "I do not remember that at all". Well, this was still a few months before I went public. I wasn't quite ready yet... and what happened after I posted it was actually kinda hilarious. I panicked, because I had no clue how to get it public, whether I wanted it public or not, if I would really want to keep doing this... and I deactivated it. After one hour. My first blog lasted one hour.
Part II: Going Public
Well, one day, on the incredibly random week of July 22, 2023 (the third week of Jonas Brothers' Waffle House at #1) I just decided to bring back my blog. I left a comment on Ethan's blog so he would at it to his blog list and I would cement myself as part of the "Hits 1 blogging community". It was a lot of fun. I loved typing the countdown out while each song came on, and publishing my posts at 9:00 every Saturday just as the countdown ended. In fact, the latest I had ever gotten a countdown post out during that period was one busy week where I had to move it to Sunday. And people viewed my blog. I wasn't sure how to feel about that, but I generally enjoyed the attention I got.
After about two months of blogging publicly, challenges inevitably came along. You might remember my review of Guts by my now-#1 artist Olivia Rodrigo. No, not this 100% scoring re-review we know and love. The first review from my old blog. Thinking back on that, I think I agree with some people in my life who viewed my blog who told me I was too harsh on certain songs. The truth is, I didn't rate Bad Idea Right and Get Him Back as "terrible" songs because of true issues with the songs themselves, but more just gripes about the music industry and how choices of promotion for singles in recent years prioritizes commercial appeal over authentic artistry. In other words, I hate fun. (By the way, the album still got a 72% anyway even with those low ratings, which is impressive.) I started worrying about my takes being controversial. Music is subjective, and I tried to be cautious not to claim anything as objectively "worse" or "better", and I never dared to attack someone for their opinions, but I still felt like I was doing something wrong.
On top of that, I'm so sorry (or glad, depending on how you look at it) if Hippo is reading this, but here is a confession/apology for him... so, there were a few times he commented on my posts asking me to join the Hits 1 Discord, and I didn't reply to him. I, refusing to join the Discord for reasons I will not disclose, made a really bad decision. Instead of politely declining his offer... I disappeared. Those requests, combined with the Guts review not being well-received by non-bloggers who read my posts, are the factors that ultimately caused me to intentionally deactivate my blog a second time. Right after Ethan went on his long hiatus. And I didn't say a word about it. I deeply regret everything about that to this day.
Of course, I came back for like two weeks that December (lying and saying "my blog got deactivated... I don't understand life sometimes" as if a Blogger moderator reported my blog or something), but no one really saw it and my afk life started getting increasingly busy. Since I knew blogging would be a pointless chore at that time, I deactivated again... but now we get back into the funny stuff. I accidentally deactivated it permanently that time. At the time, I regretted that because then I had no way to activate any of my old posts. But looking back, most of my early posts were 🤮 anyway so it doesn't matter in the long run.
Part III: The Experimental Phase
I just wouldn't let go of blogging. I just wouldn't leave forever. In January 2024, I created a new URL, hallettscountdownreviews.blogspot.com (the blog you know and love today!) and tried out an experiment. I just made
this post and didn't announce anything, and I was curious to see if anyone would notice on their own. Sure enough, they did. People started flocking to my blog for the next two months, before my giant announcement in March: that I would be returning to blogging full-time.
To redeem myself after the last time, my first proper post after that was a revised review of Guts, which somehow managed to score a 100%. No, not every song got a 5/5, but the few songs that got 3s and 4s were matched by the beyond incredible Vampire (6/5) and Teenage Dream (10/5). (It's still the only album that I've given a 100% score to this day, with Taylor Swift's Evermore being the closest one with 99%.) I restarted weekly countdown reviews, usually much later in the week than I used to post them, but still relatively regular. But more notably, I started to hone in on my love of reviewing albums I discovered with my re-review of Guts. I reviewed Sour, Eternal Sunshine, and even the complete Tortured Poets Department + Anthology album. I even created an entire page of the scores every album review got.
Along with all that, I created a chart on Crownnote (which I haven't updated in a year but who cares) where I shared my top 20 songs each week. This motivated me to find more music I really liked. I was having a lot of fun blogging. Yeah... that didn't last long at the time.
Part IV: Changing My Blog Market
After not too long, I got tired of making countdown reviews. I was really only keeping it going because it was already how I established myself in the community. I mean, fgs my blog was called "Hallett's Countdown Reviews". But then, as you probably remember, I made that STUPID "countdown prediction" post. For one, the post itself was absurd. It was based more on personal preference than actual genuine predictions. We all knew WCBF wasn't actually gonna hit #1, and Rain On Me was definitely not re-entering at #15 at anytime soon. And don't get me started on Fortnight jumping 21 spots?! But the worse part was that I claimed it was going to be a weekly post series... right before an unannounced five-week absence. I explain the reasons for that in vague detail in this possibly even more infamous post that ultimately led to me returning to countdown reviews, due to some great songs debuting Hitbound.
I started to redevelop my love for music reviewing, bringing myself to post insane multi-day album review series to celebrate relatively arbitrary numbers of pageviews. (I mean, did I really need to post SIX random album reviews just to commemorate getting *chuckles* 3,000 views on my blog, counting my own views?) But unsurprisingly, my album reviews were my most successful posts... so I made my blog more album review-focused. For my next pageview special, I did something different. Since I had then gone from a casual fan of Taylor's music to a level two Swiftie, I made a new kind of post, inspired by some Swiftie YouTubers I was starting to follow. It was a conceptual "alternate version" of the Eras Tour setlist, if I was in charge of the set, which you can find here! It was super fun to make, and it not only reinforced my love for Swift content, but it introduced another style of post I hadn't tried before - fan designs, which I've now done more and more of.
And admittedly... then I sorta ran out of ideas. I had reviewed basically every album known to man at the time (yes, even Brat, which I was clear about letting people know I thought it was overrated). Yes, I had a two-month absence, which I didn't speak much about for some reason, but then I made a series of posts that really started to skyrocket my blogging quality further: the beloved twelve days of Christmas posts! This gave us playlists, conceptual album artwork and tracklists, EP and album reviews, and a few miscellaneous year-end things. I'm still really proud of that. It was truly a blast to make.
Part V: Recent Months
This section won't be near as detailed, because if you're currently reading this, it's more than likely you've at least seen my recent posts. So, yeah, the first few weeks were a bit messy, with my initially ideal schedule of bringing back weekly countdown reviews and implementing biweekly album reviews, which then unexpectedly bled into an unfortunate time in my personal life, ultimately being unrealistic for my afk time and mental health. You can see that explanation post here. I thought, and still think to this day, that I likely won't be posting countdown reviews ever again on this blog. I decided copying and pasting a list of songs into template and creating tiresome reviews of every mid song on Hits 1 when everyone else was doing the same thing just to keep the established premise of the blog was very unnecessary and wouldn't be fun.
So then I started something that I think really catapulted my blog. Hallett's Hits. A personal chart system, similar to my Crownnote chart from early 2024, but more complex and more fun to make. It was less time consuming and more interesting when I wasn't just a broken record saying the same things a million times about songs I'll forget about one week after I hear them. Hallett's Hits got me to 10,000 views very quickly, and this special has been a great experiment with a few genres of posting to see which ones I enjoy most!
Part VI: Future
Yes, this post will also include some post ideas I have for the future. First of all, I haven't gotten nearly tired of Hallett's Hits, and I hope to continue that as long as possible. I also had an idea for a post that I was originally gonna do for the last day of the 10,000 views special, but it just took too long - some fanmade designs of Taylor's Version lyric videos for Reputation and Debut. I'll post those once I finish making them, which might take a while. I actually have a lot of random concepts for long-form Swiftie content, again mostly inspired by Swiftie YouTube channels I follow, which I might do as a 13,000 views special series (hopefully before 2026!) Also, there is a lot of good material for album reviews this year - A Matter Of Time comes out on August 22, OR3 is projected for 2025, and Rep TV and Debut TV will be absolutely massive. (Edit: it's one month after I made this story post and that last statement has already aged like milk.)
Anyway, thank you so much for reading my blog! I'm honored to have 10,000 views. It feels like just yesterday I was freaking out over 100 views... and that's it for this post.
(TL;DR - I started blogging the Hits 1 Weekend Countdown in early 2023, intentionally deactivated it a million times for stupid reasons, changed my content style, blah blah blah, here I am!)
That's all for now! Byeeeeeeeeee!
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