Dear readers,

At the beginning of lockdown, I wrote this statement about how things looked for us at Loud And Quiet. The short version was that it didn’t look very good at all.

For reasons listed in that post, it was looking like we were going to have to close L&Q after 15 years of being in print. The chief factor was a simple one: we’d always given our magazine away for free, funding it via advertising, and our advertising (mostly from festivals and live shows) had vanished overnight due to the COVID-19 crisis. Being dependant on advertising had put us in a vulnerable position for years, and the global situation had meant that the chickens had finally, rapidly come home to roost, as my grandad never used to say.

But what’s happened since has been quite remarkable. We asked you, our readers, to support what we do by subscribing to the magazine for the next year. The response has been amazing over the last couple of months, and we now have enough new subscribers to get back up and running.

As I write this latest update about our future, I have to be careful to not give the wrong impression, while trying not to kill the celebration of what we’ve achieved with your help. We didn’t hold out too much hope of reaching this point back in April, and I’m extremely happy to announce that we are about to start work on our 142nd edition. It’ll be out August 15th, all subscribers have been notified last week, and we’ve got a lot of new things planned to show our gratitude to those who have supported us. But this is also just the beginning of us getting to a point where L&Q can sustain itself via the people who read and enjoy it. We will need at least the same amount of new subscribers to sign up again, which means we’re going to be going on about it a lot for the rest of the year, and… well… forever.

For now, we can get back to making the thing that we love, and hopefully as more people find out about what we do, they’ll support it as so many of you already have.

Making an independent music magazine, it’s sometimes hard to work out if anyone really gives a shit. COVID-19 has provided us with this bizarrely proud moment, where every day I’ve received messages of support and thanks for the artists we cover and how we do that.

We’ve also received some extremely kind donations, and made some money for Black Lives Matter in the process.

If we keep banging on about subscriptions, please forgive us. And help us spread the word that for us to reach a place of absolute safety, we need fellow fans of new music to sign up to the below package, for the equivalent of 96p per week.

Thank you for keep us alive. Here’s to the reevaluation of music and the arts continuing long after COVID-19.

Stu x

The Loud And Quiet Subscriber bundle (£50 for the entire year)

1. Our next 6 physical editions delivered to your door
2. The digital editions of our next 6 editions, including downloads
3. A copy of our commemorative 15 years of Loud And Quiet 32-page homemade zine
4. A Loud And Quiet leather bookmark
5. A Loud And Quiet die-cast logo pin
6. Our monthly subscriber’s only playlists
7. Entry into our monthly Album of the Month vinyl draw