Getting on the Business End
Needs must, and the power of Paying it Forward
Fine.
I’ll do the thing.
step right up step right up step right up
everyone's a winner bargains galore
that's right you too can be the proud owner
of the quality goes in before the name goes on
All Kinds Musick only started a few short months ago, but the audience is growing—and I am just presumptuous enough to think that might mean you value what I’m doing here. So, I’m going to do the thing you’re supposed to do if you want people to contribute financially to an undertaking.
I have a proposal for you, but first, just to get it out of the way, I’m gonna ask you to click this button and put some money in the hat:
The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle
I’ve looked at the extensive music-related offerings of my fellow Substackers to see what they do to justify asking for financial support.
Some of them put a lot of work into deeply researched and well-written essays, which they mostly put behind a paywall. Others run crowd-sourced playlists or offer giveaways for paid subscribers. As always, seeing their great work triggers my Imposter Syndrome and almost convinces me to stop distracting you with my little ‘Stack.
In contrast to the pros, I try to give you two brief (500 to 1,500 word) posts a week that introduce you to (I hope) a variety of new artists or kinds of musicks, and tell you something personal about how I connected to them. I hope that my posts will help you find something new and exciting to listen to, or that you might learn how to break out of your favorite genre and experience new things. (Because that is a skill that requires effort and discipline.)
I like to keep things simple, so other than my Taylor Swift/1989 project and the Musical Zodiac, I don’t have a gimmick. If I put my mind to it, I could probably add some razzmatazz to my pitch. Do a musical showstopper, inflate your perception of my value, lock half of my stuff behind a paywall, and hope your FOMO will unlock your wallet… but then I would feel like this guy:
Instead, I’m going to suggest a strategy that might make it easier for you to justify subscribing to my little newsletter:
Paying It Forward
A few of my fellow writers and readers have commented in their Notes and Newsletters that if they paid a subscription to every Substack they thought deserved it, they would go bankrupt. I feel the same way.
But…then I remembered…
Back when I spent long night shifts sitting on a Unix workstation, waiting for things to happen, I used to play this Konquest game. You’ve probably seen dozens of games like it. The idea is to use the resources generated by one or two starting planets to take over all of the planets in your galaxy.
Each turn, you decide how many ships to send from each of your planets, and where to send them. Planets you “own” generate a certain number of ships each turn; ships you send to another planet will take one turn to travel across each square between their starting planet and the receiving planet. The trick to winning is to keep enough ships at each of your planets to defend against attack while also sending enough ships to other planets to defeat their defenders.
So I find that the best use of your meager resources is to constantly send ships from one planet to the next—rather than trying to stockpile ships in one place, you win by building a robust economy of trade between your planets.
A Winning Strategy
My proposition to you is this:
For every four (4) paid subscribers I get, All Kinds Musick will subscribe to another Substack music newsletter.
If you value what I’m doing here, and decide to become a paid subscriber (at any level), you will get access to things like my full archive, and to a monthly Paid Subscribers Only post to help me decide who else to subscribe to.
Ultimately, I will decide who my newsletter does and does not support—but the idea is for my subscribers to get a say in proposing where the ships go next.
Why Send “Ships” to This Planet?
If we lived in the money-free utopia of Star Trek, I’d be happy to keep doing what I’m doing without bothering with payment. But our universe is not ideal, and my little planet is under threat of attack.
My day job for 27 years has been “pushing a mouse for the Man” as a federal employee of the United States. Under normal circumstances, I would reach retirement age in about 5 years, and a project like All Kinds Musick would keep me active without having to be a source of income. But because 90 million eligible voters did not show up to vote in 2024, and 70 million of those who did show up voted for …*waves hand at chaos and death*… this man is threatening a shake-up that could force me out of my job.
As a mediocre, middle-aged white man (Ijeoma Oluo wrote a book about me that is worth reading), the idea of trying to find a public sector job along with millions of other former feds while a bronzer-coated felon sleep-farts his way through crashing the world’s economy doesn’t sound like a recipe for success. So before we get to that point, I have resolved to do something that might help pay the bills and let me keep doing what I love doing: sharing musicks with my friends.