How it all began: Founded on September 22, 2002, Musiqtone.com began life as MusicMania, a one-page website created by two Purdue University students for a project in their freshman English class. Original co-founders Alan Ho and Peter Burke along with a couple other classmates decided to forge ahead after the fall semester and grow MusicMania into a music website just for music fans. "We wanted to have a music site free from the influence of outside corporate interests, do it our way, cover it our way," said the original co-founders. In 2003, MusicMania began sowing the seeds that would become Musiqtone.com by as both Ho and Burke termed it, "we're going indie baby!" by creating indie coverage and what would become The Critics Corner as the site added two dormmates that shared the co-founders' philosophy on covering music and critiquing it.

In 2004, armed with a new layout and approach to creating a "balanced focus into the music world", the site forged a relationship with now defunct Colorado-based CDigix, a then digital entertainment firm that catered legal music downloads to Purdue University and many other colleges around the country. The lessons learned from CDigix people would carry on and finalize the formation of something even bigger...

The beginnings of Musiqtone.com: With a need to expand their horizons and to have a new beginning, MusicMania became Musiqtone on February 8, 2005. With what would become today The Music Lounge, The Critics Corner and The Listening Lounge, the now online music newsmagazine created what would become The Hot Seat with Texan singer-songwriter Michael Celedon, Atlanta singer-songwriter Pete Schmidt, Purdue student and singer-songwriter Amanda Shelly and Texas alt-rockers wakingNORMAN kicking it all off. This in turn helped create the feature that would put the future music news & media outlet on the map, You Gotta Know. Kicking off the freshly minted feature included a stable of singer-songwriters: Lydia Gray, Curtis Peoples and Britney Christian.

Now: Musiqtone is now Musiqtone.com, an online music news & media outlet and what started out in 2006 with 6 people has become an operation of more than 20 staff writers, scattered across the four geographic regions in the United States, each one with a regional head and 2 assistant regional heads. And what was a complete chance encounter with execs at Universal Motown and Universal Republic has become a wide ranging network of relationships with the Big Four and its network of public relations firms that it does business with. Of course, our original connection into the indie and underground is still going strong as You Gotta Know boasts alums like Curtis Peoples, All Time Low, The Academy Is (before they became THE Academy Is), emerging country starlet Veronica Ballestrini, former Top Model finalist Sarah VonderHaar and its biggest alums yet, now pop stars Honor Society, rising singer-songwriter Ryan Star, alt-rock stars All Time Low and Chicago alt-rockers Treaty of Paris.

Where are we?: Musiqtone.com originally was borne out of a basement computer lab in Purdue's Beering Hall of Liberal Arts but then transitioned into the 4th floor of Cary Quadrangle SE. Now it operates physically in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago that has bred of course, The Academy Is and is home to the Sears Centre.