In the 1989 Doctor Who episode "Ghost Light", a highly advanced alien being had been sent early in the life of Earth to catalogue all species on the planet. Many aeons later, this poor creature is still on Earth, frustrated because, by the time he completes the catalogue, all the species have changed into something quite different and he must start all over. Evolution has been his undoing. To review e-junkie is like that. Each time you think you have the site all figured out, some new feature is added and the site evolves into something newer and better. Like that alien being, I keep having to go back and take another look.

I am not by profession a technician or programmer and I don't really understand a lot of the technical ins and outs of making a commerce website work. I am however, a very experienced marketer with a strong background in broadcast and print media as well as advertising and promotional agencies for more than forty years. Throughout that time, I have also been a working independent artist promoting my own writing, photography, and music as well as that of others. When I undertook to review the new e-junkie website, I decided to review not how well it is or is not designed as a technical program but how well it does or does not work as a marketing tool for the independent artist who uses it. As my own artistic focus over the past few years has been on making and selling music, I chose to come to the site less as an objective critic and more as a musician with a CD to sell.

Over the past dozen or so years, I've seen a plethora of new websites crop up where independent musicians can post songs to market and sell or just to present their talents to the world. As one of those independent artists (with my group Poem de Terre), I've signed up for and evaluated many of these sites. Some are well designed and very user-friendly, and manage to grow and prosper, helping some but not most of their musician clients to do the same. Others, like delicate desert flowers, blossom in a flash of colour and promise, then wither and die. A common theme is that, after these websites are set up initially, very little if anything changes or improves. This is not the case with e-junkie, where growth and change seems constant.