I try not to be too heavy-handed when it comes to pitching our upgrade membership program. I try and keep the big sell to once a year, and as we walk into October, it’s that time again.

As I wrote about last year, things are bizarre in the online space. Ad revenue has still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. The place for a small independent, primarily text-based music website and community is extremely not in the mainstream of where the internet is these days. But, tens of thousands of people still come and read our homepage daily, and thousands of people hang out and talk in our forums as well. And, like so many of you, I still have a passion for music that bursts from my seams.

So, if you’d like to see us continue to do what we do, please consider becoming a supporting member of the website. Doing so gives you awesome perks like a dark theme for the website and removes all of the advertisements. I built the website to be extremely fast to load, and without ads, it’s almost unbelievable how speedy it feels. I know many of you use an ad-blocker, and I could be far more hostile to those that have them installed to incentivize either uninstalling them or becoming a member, but I don’t. But if you do use an ad-blocker, please consider just signing up for our smallest package. For pennies a day, you can get a better experience on the website and can be absolved of any ad-blocking guilt because without the ads and the supporting members, we simply could not exist.

There are three packages, all of them have the same perks, and you can choose what tier fits with you. The truth is, I’m bad at selling myself but built the kind of system I wish more online businesses had. I think we have a great core product, and we have an easy way to remove all ads and help keep us online. That’s really the entire pitch.

As always, thank you for reading. In a world dominated by YouTube or hot-take chasing SubStack personalities, it’s often hard to know where we fit into the landscape. But every week, I see how many people still check out our little corner of the internet. And every week, someone tells me they’ve discovered a new band they love because we wrote about them. And every week, I laugh at a joke posted somewhere in our community. So, I remain happy we’re still online, and if you feel the same, please consider becoming a member.

Thank you.

It’s been a little over a week since I launched the new version of Chorus.fm and I’ve been pretty blown away by the positive response. I think it may be the best reaction to a redesign of any website I’ve ever built. For fun, I pulled out a bunch of the initial sketches I made during the process, as well as some of the various other designs I played around with before actually building the website. I thought some might find the entire process interesting.