Ink 19 is the glass-bottom boat of the cultural press, connecting a global audience with the most exciting new music, media, and thought.

Since their inception a century and a half ago, glass-bottom boats have steered adventurous travelers through Florida’s Silver Springs and other succulent places, spotlighting aquatic life in underwater architecture teeming with detail and action. The vessels are outfitted with transparent bottoms, allowing passengers to view a world they know must exist, but can’t normally see.

Ink 19’s mission is to guide the curious, adventurous, and completely oblivious through new realms of sound, sight, and experience. With our words and media, we spotlight the most fascinating specimens among an endless stream of new music, film, books, and art to connect readers with their latest favorite thing.

Ink 19’s writers and creators are a diverse collective of passionate volunteers sharing our varied perspectives in an environment free from editorial gatekeeping. Above all, we are humans with the power to surprise our readers in a way no algorithm can.

Ink 19 History

Read the June 1991 issue of Ink 19.

Publisher Ian Koss and Art Director Francis Dreyer initially envisioned Ink 19 as a monthly program guide to accompany Room 19, a public-access cable television show where strange music happened. While the show never got off the ground, Ink 19 magazine did, and in June of 1991, the first free issue was printed.

We distributed 5,000 copies of that initial 16-page installment throughout Central Florida, from Melbourne, our home base on Florida’s Space Coast, all the way to Orlando, an hour and a half away by station wagon. Over time, more outlets fell under our sway, and in late 1993, we entered the Tampa metropolitan market. By 1995 we’d added Atlanta, Georgia, and in late 1997, Miami and South Florida to our growing territory, making us the largest music magazine in the Southeast U.S. We launched ink19.com in 1997, the first music magazine to “go online,” reaching a global audience with a mere mouse click.

Ink 19 helped bring many emerging artists from the Southeast scene to the mainstream, including Marvelous 3, Less Than Jake, the Mercury Program, Underwater, Jucifer, the Causey Way, and Hot Water Music, among others. We’ve published Ink 19 for over 30 years, and we have no intention of going away.

Ink 19 Content

Ink 19 covers an incredibly diverse range of media in stunning volume. Our writers scrutinize parades of human entertainment to bring our audience intelligent critical analysis of a broad variety of artists’ works. It is genuinely our favorite pursuit.

To give you an idea of our scope, stories and podcasts have covered rock ‘n’ roll, metal, ska, rockabilly, indie-rock, punk, all kinds of country, emo, hip hop, rap, reggae, goth, industrial, electronica, swing, noise, alt-radio, classical, and surely other musical genres. We’ve written up our takes on horror films and kung fu classics, zines and retrospectives, Shakespeare and the Orlando Fringe Festival. We’ve endured long lines and Will Call so our readers feel like they’re in the photo pit, right along with us.