Cove Magazine: the new-music archive, 2002 to 2008

The archive, opened

Cove was a small American music magazine that ran online for six years, fifty-odd issues, and one argument that outlived it. This page is the front door to what survives: the rankings, the interviews, the profiles, and the charts, restored from the archive and cleaned up enough to read.

What Cove was

Cove Magazine launched in 2002 as a web publication about new music, with an emphasis on pop and R&B and a house style that put a number on everything. It ran monthly issues through 2006, slowed to occasional updates in 2007 and 2008, and announced its closure in November 2008. Its editors were fans first and critics second, which shows in the writing: the enthusiasm is real, the grammar is occasionally improvised, and the opinions are not hedged.

The magazine's best-known piece was a ranked list of pop vocalists published in 2004, which put Christina Aguilera at number one and was picked up widely enough that outside sites still cite it. That poll is the reason this domain has the readership it does, and it is why the archive was worth restoring rather than letting the pages rot in a cache.

Nothing on these pages has been rewritten. The original layouts — built in a 2004-era page editor out of spacer images and nested tables — were unwrapped so the text can be read on a phone, dead advertising slots and a defunct subscription form were removed, and a handful of image galleries whose pictures were never archived have been left out. The words are the magazine's own. Where a page's original title was just the site name, it has been given a descriptive one.

The covers

Three of the magazine's issue covers survive in the archive. The rest of its photographs — artist portraits from the features and the poll — are collected on the photographs page.

Cove Magazine cover, November 2004, Snoop Dogg — November 2004: Snoop Dogg.

Cove Magazine cover, February 2005, Ashanti — February 2005: Ashanti.

Cove Magazine cover, February 2006, Fall Out Boy — February 2006: Fall Out Boy.

The 2004 poll, and why it travelled

The list that outlived the magazine was not a poll of readers or critics. It was the editors' own scoring, published under the slogan the site used everywhere, “We Show It”, and it did something most lists were too cautious to do: it put a number next to every name, ran the scale from a perfect fifty at the top through zero into negative figures at the bottom, and let the arithmetic embarrass whoever it embarrassed. Christina Aguilera scored the only perfect mark. Established names landed in the minus column. The method was never explained.

That combination — a bold result and an invisible method — is exactly what makes a list travel. It was quoted, mocked, and defended on forums and fan sites for years, and the references outlasted the magazine by a decade. The two rankings written for this archive in 2026 keep the format and fix the flaw: same idea, a hundred names in an order, but with the four component scores printed beside each placement so an argument can be specific.

The rankings

Cove's signature format was the numbered list with a score attached, and two of those lists have been rebuilt from scratch in 2026 with the scoring published rather than hidden.

The 100 Outstanding Pop Vocalists — the 2026 edition of the list that made the magazine's name. A hundred singers scored on four components of twenty-five points each: instrument, live delivery, interpretation, and influence. Every placement shows its four numbers, so a disagreement can name the component it disagrees with. Aretha Franklin is first; the 2004 winner sits fourteenth, and the entry explains why.
The 100 Outstanding Pop Recordings — the companion list, scoring records rather than voices on song, performance, production, and consequence. A recording and a song are different objects; this list ranks the specific take, and says which version is eligible when several exist.
The case for number one — why Aretha Franklin tops the vocalists list, argued component by component, including the one score where she does not get full marks and why the method, not the singer, is responsible.
The case for number two — Whitney Houston at 97, and why three one-point deductions are one point.
The case for number three — Stevie Wonder at 96, the only Interpretation 25 in the top five.
The case for number four — Mariah Carey at 95, two components at 25 and a 21 that is the honest one.
The case for number five — Michael Jackson at 94, the singer whose voice is not the point.
The 25 best debut albums of the 2000s — scored as debuts, from the Strokes to Corinne Bailey Rae.
The Top 20 of June 2006, twenty years on — what became of every record on one week of Cove's own chart.
The ten most acclaimed songs of 2005, revisited — Cove's own end-of-year list, judged again.
The Top 20 this week — the successor to Cove's weekly chart, refreshed daily, with the Cove 100 singers marked.
The 100 Pop Songs of the New Millennium — the original 2005 chart, compiled by the magazine from video rotation on BET, CMT, Fuse, MTV and VH1 and from the national radio charts. A snapshot of what the first half of the decade sounded like from the inside, before anyone knew which of it would last.

The interviews

Cove's interviews were conducted by e-mail and printed in full, questions and all, which makes them unusually candid. The section the magazine called “Breaking and Entering” was reserved for artists who had not yet broken; its longest subject was a Brighton-born singer-songwriter who had just moved to New York.

Nick Howard: Breaking & Entering — the first half of a long conversation with Nick Howard about growing up on soul records and The Who, learning to perform, and what it took to leave England for a music career in a city where nobody knew him. Fourteen hundred words, none of them promotional.
Nick Howard on ‘Something to Talk About’ — the second half, recorded after his second album. He talks about the difference between a record made in a hurry and one made on his own terms, and about the songs on it that came from other people's lives rather than his own.
Yuri of CelineDreams.com — a 2006 interview with the founder of a fan site that collected dreams people had had about Celine Dion, which had by then been written up by MTV and The New York Times. An early document of internet fandom as a creative act, and funnier than that description suggests.
Aric McKeown of MakeMeWatchTV.com — from the magazine's series on webmasters, a conversation with the creator of a site that let strangers decide what its owner watched on television. The mid-2000s web in one page: an odd idea, built by one person, with an audience that arrived before the business plan.

Profiles and essays

Mariah Carey: The Queen of Pop — the magazine's “Essentials” profile from 2004, written when Carey's comeback was still a rumour. It argues for the voice over the celebrity, explains the 49.7 she was given in the vocalists poll, and reads now as an early draft of the consensus that formed around her a year later.
Offstage: Sheryl Crow on making C'mon, C'mon — Crow on the recording of her most upbeat album, the studio process she describes as going in with a plan and coming out with its opposite, and how a record ends up sounding like the person who made it regardless.
Jack Johnson: flying under the radar — the Cove Music page from spring 2005, leading with a piece on the former surfer whose latest album had made him famous against his stated wishes, followed by the desk's picks for the week.

News and charts

The magazine tracked the charts obsessively and wrote them up weekly. Most of those pages were ephemeral by design and have not been restored, but a few captured a moment worth keeping.

iTunes Top 10, spring 2005 — the download chart in the week Weezer's “Beverly Hills” debuted at number one over Will Smith, Rob Thomas and The Killers. The iTunes Store was two years old and the magazine treated its chart as the future, which turned out to be right.
Chart Chat, July 2007 — the desk's picks for a single week: Aly & AJ, Justin Lanning, the Smashing Pumpkins' return, and a recommendation or two that did not age as well. Written in the magazine's late, looser voice.
50 Cent and The Game at the Boys Choir of Harlem — a news page from April 2005 built around the press conference that ended the two rappers' public feud, at which they jointly handed $253,500 to the choir, with the rest of the week's news underneath.

Photographs

Photographs from Cove Magazine, 2004 to 2006 — the surviving covers and artist portraits: Damian Marley, John Mayer, Carrie Underwood, Christina Aguilera, Ciara, Omarion, the Isley Brothers, 50 Cent and The Game at the press conference that ended their feud, and more, with the stories they ran beside.

Everything else in the archive

The pages above are the ones worth starting with. These are the rest of what survived: the weekly charts and picks, the news pages built from wire copy, and the magazine's own furniture. Titles are the magazine's where they had one and descriptive where they did not.

Breaking & Entering and interviews

Charts and weekly picks

News pages

About the magazine

How to read the archive

Dates on these pages are the dates the pages were captured, and they are left as written. A chart from 2005 says 2005; an interview conducted by e-mail in 2006 still refers to “your new album” as if it were new. That is the point of an archive. Where a page referred to something that no longer exists — a message board, a subscription form, a MySpace profile — the reference has been removed rather than left as a dead link, and pages that were nothing but such references have not been restored at all.

The photographs are a mixed record. The archive kept most of the magazine's own artwork and artist portraits but almost none of the gallery pages, so the issue covers and event photos are gone. Images that could not be recovered were removed rather than left as broken boxes.

Titles have been supplied where the originals were missing or were simply the site name. The text under them is unchanged, including the spelling. Cove's writers wrote quickly and cared more about being first than being proofread, and correcting them twenty years later would make the pages less honest, not more.

A note on the name

Cove Magazine has no connection to any other publication using the word “Cove”. The original magazine closed in 2008; this archive restores its published work and adds two rankings written in 2026 in the same format. Nothing here is for sale except, occasionally, a clearly marked link in the footer, which is how the hosting is paid for. See About for how the 2026 rankings are scored.