Close readers and supporters of Loud And Quiet and the UK’s independent music press may have noticed that during this, the 19th year of Loud And Quiet magazine, we’ve not been much of a magazine at all. Having released a fresh physical edition of L&Q every month before the pandemic and every other month since, 2024 has seen us publish just one lonely issue – February’s Kim Gordon edition. A very good edition, but a sole edition, all the same. The hiatus that has followed is something that I planned for but didn’t want to make a song and dance about until I had either a.) figured out what’s next for the mag, or b.) was still scratching my head so late into the year that I really should say something. Here we are at B.

The reason most magazines stop is because they’re finally out of money, but that’s not strictly true of L&Q. By the end of 2023 we’d been consistently bringing in the same below par funds for years on end. The opposite of “good money”, but good enough money for us to make it work and go again in 2024, and most likely ’25, ’26, and so on. As thousands of people in the creative industries will know though, the continual squeeze of “getting by” is an exhausting thing, and those below par funds had become twice as hard to secure. I’m sure many freelancers – and employed people, too – are familiar with how that goes: working twice as much for the same wage in an age where we’re constantly told, often with well-meaning encouragement, however depressing it actually is, that survival is success.

At the start of 2024, I came to the realisation that I needed to stop the physical edition of Loud And Quiet for a time. I needed to stop it because we were about to deliver a full year of our Midnight Chats podcast (45 episodes over 45 weeks), which I knew was going to be a full time job in itself. But I also needed to stop it because it had become a monstrous amount of work. As I say, Loud And Quiet was getting by, but that didn’t include any money to grow the full time team from 2 by Oct 2023, and 1 thereafter. The demands of making the magazine, distribution, self-promotion, endless algorithm gaming, playlists, newsletters, running the site etc. became unsustainable. I needed a break to have a break, and a break so I could think about what could be done. Obviously, if we had a the full team working on the magazine that we really need to sustain the standard I’ve always aimed for (around 6 people at my last calculation), I wouldn’t have hit the wall, so I guess you could say that, in real terms, Loud And Quiet was out of money. Had been for years.

Since March, I’ve been looking at it from every angle and haven’t quite come up with how to bring back the print magazine yet; not in a manner that threads the needle of being easier to properly fund (with the writing and photography fees that our team has always deserved and never fully received), to grow its readership, and be of the quality we always managed to sustain for the artists and our readers. I’m not ruling it out, and very much miss it, but the fact that I’ve not cracked it yet suggests that perhaps a magazine that was started as a home-printed fanzine in 2005 is impossible to run in the manner I’d like it to be in 2024. I’ve been speaking with heads of record labels and our subscribers, about their ideal wants and needs from today’s music press, as there’s not just a question of ‘how do you make a music magazine in 2024?’ here, but also, ‘is a music magazine what we should be making?’. Perhaps, I’ve come to accept, there simply aren’t enough people who want to consume the music we want them to in the manner we want them to, for the price we need them to, to not just slog on but grow and feel like we still have a worthwhile place in the culture via that particular physical format. God knows that much bigger companies have faced the same issue over the years, and printing magazines costs a staggering amount of money.

That all probably sounds more disheartened than it is. Time off from the magazine has allowed our podcast to grow exponentially, as we hoped it would, reaching music fans and platforming artists in a different way this year. We’ve continued to write as much as we can here on the site, restricted though we are by the impossibility of making money through a website alone (massive respect to our friends at The Quietus and The Line Of Best Fit who are the back-breaking kings of that and making fine successes of it), and our Loud And Quiet Weekly newsletter has proved to us that the best way to beat the algorithm is to stop playing with it altogether. (Please do sign up for our weekly roundup every Friday morning.)

It’s actually been perversely fun to think about all this stuff this year, even though the future of the print magazine remains uncertain. It will have been my obsession for 20 years in January 2025, so needless to say any decisions around it aren’t made lightly. And then there are all the other iterations of what Loud And Quiet could look like without the print magazine. That was never my plan. It was always, when the mag goes, it all goes. So far it hasn’t all gone, and that’s something to figure out over the coming months, too.

So there it is. “I’m working on it,” would have probably been enough. In the meantime, please do subscribe to the podcast and the newsletter, which we’ve just moved over to Substack, allowing readers to sign up for free or opt in with a few quid to help support it if they fancy it.  And thank you to all of our readers who’ve been in touch to ask what’s going on and offer their support.

Thanks for reading. Stu