Substack Birthday No. 1
Delights & Disappointments
On December 30th last year I published my first post on Substack. I’m checking in one year later to highlight some delights and few disappointments, and chart a course for 2025.
A year ago I turned to Substack in a mild panic, kind of like that scene in Star Wars where Luke, Leia and Han are in the trash compactor. The walls were closing in and there was a monster circling in the trash-water below. In this metaphor the monster in the trash-water is social media and the walls closing in is Spotify (announcing it’s demonetizing the vast majority of tracks on its platform in a few months). Substack is the escape hatch.
To put a finer point on it, I was aware that Instagram wasn’t meaningfully helping me grow my audience for my music. Instead, it was zombifying my attention with its hooks and dopamine triggers. I had no control over who saw my posts and few insights. “Spray and pray” we used to call it.
And Spotify? Well, the policy announcement that struck me as outrageous, registered a collective shrug outside of small circle of independent artist advocates, and went into effect like clockwork last April. Lights out for 82.7% of the tracks on Spotify earning anything. The majority of my tracks—the long tail—were commercially snuffed out on that platform just as streaming revenues had come to represent the biggest chunk of my income. This did not sit well with me. So, in attempt to wrestle some degree of control back from the fates of the algorithms, I turned to Substack.
My first post on the topic of Spotify read like one more musician bemoaning the sky falling. I’m pretty sure it did not follow best practices for introducing my publication. Soon enough, though, I started to find my voice.
So, I thought I’d just list all the delights of my past year on Substack. (And save a few dissapointments for last.)
Delights
I quickly found a reason to try out new ideas. On Jan 2, 2024 I posted an environmental recording that focused on people and the mysterious terraced concrete hardscape at the local park. I tried out some new musical motifs and textures, some new gear, and threw myself into the nerdy research component of solving the riddle of what and why is this thing here? Voila, I inadvertently discovered a new template for sharing my soundwalks!
Moving my podcast over to Substack was a breeze, and I love it that the blog post, newsletter email, and podcast episode are all one thing. Prior to that I used Spotify for Podcasters, originally Anchor, which had shifting policies that I kept running afoul of with my content. (Spotify now refuses to even list new episodes of Soundwalk, as their terms presently bar podcasts that are primarily music.)
I discovered quite a few authors here that I find be very thoughtful, and I look forward to their dispatches. I feel like the connections I’ve made here have a little more weight to them.
My mom now has access to a running narrative of what I’m doing creatively. She listens to everything on her phone, through the little speaker.
Every paid subscriber notification is a lightning bolt, a complete shock to my system, a gust of wind in my sails. Thanks paid subscribers!
I delight in the fact that Substack is free of corporate advertising and egregious design hooks to gamify attention. (Here I’m thinking about the little triptych of “Reels” Instagram jams into everyone’s feed with click-baity, lowbrow video content. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Substack is a relative utopia, but it seems a little more dignified, at least.
Dissapointments
How many newsletters can one person really digest? For the highly engaged Substack user, there’s definitely diminishing returns, and potentially an overstuffed inbox. Is it sustainable?
The upsells, and the “call to action” buttons, often beyond the control of the authors, become a little tedious after continued exposure.
In retrospect, I wish I would have held out longer—if not indefinitely— before defining my “value proposition” with the paid subscription tier, both because it adds a some pressure to my creative workflow, and it deploys the minimum level of automated upselling, which can be a turn-off to new readers. Meanwhile the dashboard view—with it’s emphasis on stats and gross annualized income—has become a persistent reminder that scaling the Substack model into a sizable income may prove too difficult a task for what I presently have to offer.
Finally, when I post a Note, I can never remember how to navigate back to it! It’s like they get sucked into a black hole or something.
What’s in store for 2025?
What’s next? Good question! Well, I recently found myself thinking the jig is up with my soundwalk formula. I leaned in hard on soundwalks as the sole format for my work for the past two years, come this April. I’ve released 60 so far. The story I tell myself is that most people do not give any consideration to what I do. Those that do either think I’m a bit strange, or they quietly appreciate it. I receive very little feedback. I like what I do, but I often wonder what I could do better.
I’ve been listening back to some of my older soundwalks on a streaming service I don’t usually use, and it highlighted a weakness in my soundwalk design thesis. It’s one that I previously considered, but I kind of just brushed off: the tracks—which are meant to flow together seamlessly when listened to as an album—can lurch in volume when the next is overall quieter or louder than the one preceding it. This is due to normalization (adjusting the volume automatically) being the default setting on all streaming services now. It’s an option you can turn off, but my guess is very few do. One favorable thing I can say about Spotify is that they normalize across albums rather than individual tracks, so there’s no lurches when listening sequentially on that platform, no matter the settings. All the other platforms reveal this unwanted quirk unless the user deselects normalization (Apple calls it “Soundcheck”) in settings. It seems to be worst with my Dolby Atmos (“Spatial Audio”) album mixes, which I discontinued in January, for several reasons besides. Maybe I’ll work up a post on Spatial Audio some day? Leave a comment if that interests you.
Maybe this particular soundwalk formula that I’ve settled into for quite a while now can be improved on. Or maybe I should find my way back to my Field Reports series that predated soundwalks, focusing on discrete tracks? Whatever happens, I want 2025 to be a year of innovation.
Having a said that, I have about ten more soundwalks in the can, and will continue to release about one a month in the new year. The other thing you can expect is one Listening Spot release per month.
Aside from that I’m working up another batch of musical pieces without environmental sounds. It’s been a while! I have some more ideas to try out too, so I’ll just leave it at that, and leave some room for surprise.
Overall though I’m realizing that I’m not telling my story as an artist as succinctly and clearly as I probably could. It’s not an easy task; I’m camera shy, and I value privacy, but if I’m going to keep working in this field, I think I have to step it up somehow.
Okay 2025: Let’s do this!