20 Years of Loud And Quiet, and time for something new
Welcome to the new, very clever era of Loud And Quiet – with 50% off for first 100 subscribers
The independent music industry is full of music fans who started something and learnt on the job. Bands, of course, but also labels, websites, promoters, management, and, in my case, a printed fanzine that became a magazine, which then needed to have its own website. Naturally, the website then needed its own podcast.
Over the last 20 years Loud And Quiet has picked up and put down: club nights, gig promotion, questionable merchandise, a Japanese edition, New York distribution and a cassette and vinyl record label. A year ago it also put down the very heart of what it is: the print title. I updated readers on our position 8 months later, explaining that a break had been needed whilst we worked on an extended series of our Midnight Chats podcast, which remains suspiciously unrecognised by all podcast awards.
As I wrote in that article, I always thought that if the physical magazine became untenable, that would be the end of L&Q: I’ve never fancied the struggles of chasing eyes around the vastness of the internet, however much people would ask, “couldn’t you just do it as a website?”. But after a lot of thinking – and a lot of talking to readers, bands and the labels that release them – I’ve got something for you. A new beginning.
Starting from tomorrow (25 Feb) I will be moving Loud And Quiet onto Substack, with a vision of how we can write about new music – and deliver artists’ stories to our readers and listeners – in a new way. This will be a quality-over-quantity operation, focussing on long-form writing and podcasts: album reviews that will read like artist features, cover-style artist interviews, essays and columns on how music affects our lives.
It will be very clever and essential reading. And a bit of a laugh.
In the busiest of weeks, subscribers will receive a maximum of 5 articles/podcasts from us; one per day, Monday to Friday. They’ll drop straight into your inbox (meaning neither you nor I need to concern ourselves so much with social media algorithms), although you’ll also be able to access all content via the Loud And Quiet Substack homepage and the Substack app.
One of those busy weeks might look something like this:
Mon: Album review
Tues: Artist interview
Wed: Essay / Op-ed piece
Thurs: Podcast / Column
Fri: L&Q Weekly roundup
(Please note that while I get things up and running, we’re likely to initially be delivering 3 articles per week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.)
Just as Alan Partridge once said “It must not, repeat, NOT turn into an all-night rave!”, we cannot go back to a point where Loud And Quiet is scraping by and hanging in there.
Over the years I tried every tactic to sustainably fund the magazine. For a long time giving it away for free and attracting advertisers worked beautifully. But things changed: social media arrived, advertisers moved to Facebook’s marketing pinpoint accuracy. Spotify robbed independent labels and budgets for any advertising dwindled further. By the time we asked our readers for their support (during the Covid pandemic), it was too late. As overwhelming as the response was, with reader subscriptions keeping L&Q going for another 3 years, we continued to post articles on our website for free, undermining our own plea for readers to buy into what we were doing. (It’s no coincident that print titles like The Wire and Private Eye are both in healthier places having rigidly stuck to their policy of not sharing their print articles online.)
With that in mind, please understand why all of our articles posted Monday to Thursday will be for paying subscribers only; Friday’s Loud And Quiet Weekly roundup newsletter will remain free for all.
So if you’ve missed the writing found in Loud And Quiet over the last year, please hit the subscribe button below and give this new format a go, from something dirt cheap like 96.153p per week. It’s not going to be exactly the same, but that’s kind of the point too. Time for a change. For Loud And Quiet, and for music writing in general. And just imagine the convenience of one piece of very clever and essential reading coming direct to you each day. Not too much, not too little.
Almost as important as signing up, please share this with your friends. One thing I’ve already learnt about Substack is that it’s a place that thrives on community and recommendations, a lot like the world of independent music. So if you like it please do pass it on and help us grow.
The first official article of this new era will be with you tomorrow, although there are already some recent posts available now for paying subscribers too:
Sex isn’t just sex in an FKA twigs song
100% Bastard: The history of evil in modern music
Loudandquiet.com will remain in place as an archive for all the writing we’ve publishing over the last 20 year, but will not be updated for the time being, except with old articles as I slowly upload all the writing from editions of the magazine that were published before our current site was built in 2016.
Thank you for reading, and to everyone for the last 20 years.
To celebrate the fact, the next 100 people who subscribe will do so at 50% off – just 25 measly pounds for the entire year. Starting… now!
Stu