100th Post - A Formal Announcement
All Kinds Musick's permanent hiatus
There’s probably not a huge overlap between my Musick audience and my Genealogy audience, so you may have missed this announcement:
To cut to the chase, here’s the most important part:
I have become increasingly aware that continuing to write on Substack is alienating the part of my audience that I care most about. When I share my posts outside of Substack’s walled garden, I not only don’t get the engagement I am looking for, but I get another response from those who are willing to tell me why they aren’t coming to see what I write: “Substack is a Nazi bar, and I won’t be a patron.”
My fellow music ‘Stackers have been great, and I’ve learned a lot from all of you, but in the year I have been doing this, I haven’t been able to reconcile the fact that as I grow my platform, I’m still doing it in a Nazi bar. The company still selectively enforces its own rules in a way that favors the people trying to destroy the country I swore an oath to defend.
I don’t expect them to change (and I gave them two years to do so), so I need to go.
In the last week, I’ve exported my Mightier Acorns content to WordPress and I’ve been working furiously to get everything neat and tidy for a re-launch over there. But I’ve hesitated to say anything over here, because I didn’t want to commit to what has been feeling increasingly inevitable.
The truth is, I have not been meeting my personal goals for All Kinds Musick - and I don’t have the spoons to move it to WordPress and start over right now.
It’s not that I haven’t been pleased with the individual pieces; I’m happy with most of the posts that have come out, and I’ve been gratified to see some of them resonate with you all. Last week’s Alice In Chains post felt solid in a way that I wish every post could.
But putting things together in a way that I feel meets my standard for what I want to say and how I want to say it has been getting harder, not easier, and the decision to leave the platform has forced me to ask myself whether I can or should continue trying at this time.
I don’t think this is the end of the journey. But, if I’m going to move to a new site, I want to do it in a way that lets me meet the goals I haven’t been meeting here. Those goals include:
including some of my own music and performances
promoting more obscure artists
putting time into helping people learn how they listen to music, with more samples and analysis.
Until I have the time and energy to do that, I’m closing up shop. If I find the time and energy, you’ll be the first to hear about it.
Thanks for listening!
