That night Charles R. Cross passed out 10,000 copies of a free four-page tabloid about Springsteen that he had created.
[2] After that modest beginning, Backstreets Magazine began an uninterrupted run of publishing.
Full color covers followed soon thereafter, and eventually Backstreets became a typical full-color published magazine.
BTX became the dominant Springsteen fan discussion forum in the U.S., supplanting prior vehicles such as the Usenet group rec.music.artists.springsteen, the "Luckytown" electronic mailing list, and the pre-Internet, telephone-based "Bruce party line".
[3] The website was successful enough that, as the decade of the 2000s progressed, the "quarterly" issues of the printed magazine came out far less frequently, causing some sporadic dissatisfaction among subscribers.