Thoughts on Substack, Digital Platforms, and “The Death of Music Journalism”

In early August, I was at the seaside, taking a break from writing about punk bands and releases. Then, while checking DIY Conspiracy’s IG feed, I was bombarded with posts about another round of culls in “alternative” music journalism. BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine had all been hit by layoffs at Veeps, the media and live-streaming company majority-owned by the corporate behemoth Live Nation.

This is hardly new. In 2023, roughly half of Bandcamp’s workforce lost their jobs during Bandcamp’s acquisition by Songtradr, with Bandcamp Daily’s editorial team smacked particularly hard. VICE Media was collapsing around the same time, filing for bankruptcy after another round of layoffs. In January 2024, Condé Nast announced cuts at Pitchfork and folded the publication into GQ as part of another corporate “restructuring.” The following month, VICE announced that it would cut hundreds more jobs and stop publishing on its website. Different companies, same bullshit; music journalism becomes expendable the moment the people in suits demand it.

One thing that followed this latest round of social media discussion around the “death of music journalism” was something we’d already seen after the cuts at Bandcamp, Pitchfork, and VICE: more writers starting their own paywalled blogs and newsletters. Soon enough, Instagram “indie music” influencers were posting reels and carousels about following the best “independent music writers,” which, unsurprisingly, mostly meant people publishing on venture-backed platforms like Substack. I even saw comments along the lines of “bring back blogs and zines, but make it Substack.”

That specific comment has been rattling around my head ever since. I don’t want anyone to lose their job, and I understand why writers are looking for ways to get paid without waiting for another corporate owner to pull the plug. But I’m worried about how often that search leads back to another company’s platform and another subscription model. I wanted to put down a few thoughts about it, hopefully without turning this into another old punk yelling at the cloud about how things were better before.

The Insatiable Content Maw

I’ve never been much interested in podcasts, reels, or video content. Written words have always been the thing for me, whether on paper or online. When DIY Conspiracy started in the 2000s, it was mainly inspired by zines like Profane Existence, HeartattaCk, and Inside Front. I loved those publications to death and wanted to do interviews and record reviews with the same musical and political direction, which I hope this site still carries today.

The online space looked much freer, more diverse, and more social back then. Bands were on MySpace, of course, but the web hadn’t yet been reduced to a handful of privately owned ventures deciding how people meet, what they see, and how they interact. There were countless free-download blogs, forums, message boards, and simple websites dealing with specific themes, all looking completely different from one another and reflecting their authors’ own creative and aesthetic visions. In the subculture circles I moved in, people shared music, writing, and knowledge freely because they wanted others with the same interests to find it. There was no need to put a real name and face in front of everything or claim individual credit for every contribution. Like plenty of others, I was happy to hide behind a ridiculous nickname, while publications with several contributors often used shared pseudonyms. My feelings haven’t changed. I’m still not a fan of copyright, and I believe that values and community matter more than authorship or personal recognition. Turning that participation in the music community into a personal brand or a revenue stream was far from what we had in mind.

All this started to change in the early 2010s, when “monetize your passion” became a thing and websites followed suit, becoming more commercial and more alike. Some music bloggers began building clout around their real names and faces, and soon enough the blog itself was becoming a way to build a career. In the rat race for followers, traffic, and quick monetization, a growing number of formerly independent music sites were absorbed into larger media companies, while many others took to clickbait headlines, ranked lists, gossip, PR, and a ceaseless flow of news meant to grab a moment’s attention and be forgotten just as quickly. Whenever a hyped artist released a new song, dropped a video, or announced a tour, a hundred sites would recycle the same story within minutes. Music sites today produce dozens of throwaway articles a day, every single day.

By the mid-2010s, I had started calling this the “buzzfeedization” of music journalism, as more websites copied the model of BuzzFeed and Bored Panda, two of the biggest factories of viral content online. That chase for viral attention continues today. The same stock phrases, templated headlines, and ranked lists are recycled so relentlessly that it barely matters which site you’re reading. Even back then, the writing had become so predictable that I started thinking about how easy it would be to build a computer program that could guess the next word in a sentence and produce articles in exactly the same style, to the point where nobody could tell a machine had written them… Well, we know what happened a few years later.

A recent example of where the chase for viral stories in punk and metal can lead came when a hardcore frontman singled out and humiliated a show-goer in a banana suit, and the whole incident became viral headline fodder across music and pop culture websites worldwide. Sure, the banana-man deserved some empathy, but the endless recycling of the story was all about engagement bait and publicity. Beyond all that, what bothers me just as much, as I mentioned earlier, is how relentlessly most of this paid music journalism relies on hype, press releases, and publicity campaigns from labels and bands with budgets and managers, rather than writers’ own curiosity to find new and exciting music.

Back in 2023, I interviewed Ian MacKaye for my irregular print-only zine with zero online presence. Ian described the internet as an always-open, insatiable maw, devouring everything in front of its face and never getting enough. A print zine, for example, has a finite number of pages, and those limits put a frame around the work. By contrast, a modern website may have no such fixed boundary. Add the pressure to keep visitors coming, stay on top of social media feeds, or keep subscribers paying, and there’s always a reason to publish more and more. The maw stays open, and everything, whether the music itself or someone’s words about the music, is bound to become “content,” with no natural end in sight.

At DIY Conspiracy, we’ve long had a policy of publishing no more than three articles a week. We can set our own boundaries online, but someone needs to make a conscious decision to do it.

Platforms, Middlemen, and Walled Gardens

In his book Enshittification, Cory Doctorow doesn’t just try to answer why everything online suddenly got worse. He analyzes how an online service gets worse and how that worsening spreads until everything else turns into a pile of shit. In the first part of the book, he traces the symptoms, mechanisms, and epidemiology of this particular social disease produced by late-stage capitalism, arguing that it infects a particular kind of digital business: the platform.

Cory explains that, in its purest form, a platform’s value comes from the people and companies using it, rather than anything unique the company itself creates. The more value its users produce, the more valuable the platform becomes. In other words, a platform is a middleman.

It’s not that all middlemen are intrinsically evil. In a sense, your favorite punk labels like La Vida Es Un Mus or Sorry State are middlemen too. They release the best punk records, distribute them, connect bands with listeners, and do useful work that most bands probably don’t want to do entirely by themselves. The problem begins when the middleman becomes powerful enough to stop merely connecting the two sides and starts acting as a gatekeeper, usurping the relationship between them. That’s why so much of the early excitement around the internet was about disintermediation: cutting out powerful middlemen and allowing people to communicate and exchange things directly.

Everyone knows how much of today’s digital creators’ income depends on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Patreon, or Substack. I’m not going to go into details here.

At what point does a platform become a gatekeeper? One obvious red flag is when one of these platforms starts locking its users into a gated community of some kind. If I don’t use Instagram and somebody sends me an Instagram reel or a photo, I’ll be prompted to log in or create an Instagram account, even if I don’t want to. If a band sends me a link to their music on Spotify (the link is something like open.spotify.com, even though there’s nothing particularly open about it), I can try to play the songs, only to be greeted by an annoying pop-up to “Sign up for free” or “download the app.” Bandcamp, for all its own problems, still lets people listen to an entire record seamlessly without creating a profile or installing anything.

A writer can be independent in what they say while still depending on a company to reach their readers. Who controls the writing, who controls its distribution, and who can read it are all part of this discussion.

The Substack Problem

Now, back to Substack.

I understand why writers and music journalists end up there. It’s incredibly easy to start, especially if you don’t know how to build your own website. I myself have thought about starting a Substack for things like sci-fi or other interests I have, simply because it would save me from building and maintaining yet another site.

For writers who have spent years being expected to churn out whatever might go viral, having a publication of their own can also give them room to write about the music, books, or culture they actually care about. They can be more selective, follow their own curiosity, and put together something more carefully curated than their former employers would have allowed. That’s a real gain in editorial freedom, and it deserves credit.

Is Substack a walled garden? Not in quite the same sense as Instagram or Spotify. You can still open and read public Substack articles on the web without having an account. Still, more and more of its architecture follows the same platform logic. Substack is free to publish on, but once you enable paid subscriptions, the company takes 10% of every transaction. Its financial interest is therefore obvious: the more writers who turn readers into paying subscribers, the more money Substack makes.

You can run an entirely free publication, of course, but the whole ecosystem is built around subscribing, following, recommending, restacking, and discovering more publications inside Substack. Its recommendation system encourages writers to promote other Substacks to their readers. There’s nothing wrong with writers recommending each other, but here those connections are increasingly organized inside one company’s limited ecosystem. Just follow enough writers in your niche and it becomes very easy to spend your entire Substack life quoting, recommending, and interacting with other people on the same platform. Before long, you’re living inside another platform bubble, much like Instagram or YouTube creators who interact mostly with others on the same platform.

That logic is precisely what makes platforms rule today’s commercialized internet. You don’t control the interface, the discovery systems, the rules, or what those rules might look like one or five years from now. Substack lets you export your posts and email list, but that doesn’t give you control over its recommendation network. Like any other middleman, Substack can remove content under its terms, and while you may own the words, you don’t own the ground beneath your feet.

As with so many venture-backed platforms, the question is what happens when the existing model can no longer produce the growth its investors expect. One of Substack’s long-term investors is Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that first backed the platform in 2019 and invested in it again in 2025. In January 2026, Andreessen Horowitz raised more than $15 billion across five new funds, doubling down on AI infrastructure and investments in so-called “national interests,” including defense. That’s worth remembering when discussing the financial interests behind this supposedly independent publishing ecosystem.

What happens when those interests demand more growth? Let me guess. More extraction, more walled gardens, more AI bullshit, and more features designed to keep people spending their money inside the platform?

Some of Substack’s choices have already had very shitty consequences. One of the first things I remember reading about the company was an Atlantic investigation titled “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.” It documented openly white-supremacist and Nazi publications operating on the platform, including some taking paid subscriptions from which Substack received its share.

In February 2026, The Guardian reported that Substack was still earning money from Nazi newsletters. The risks are not limited to the content the company chooses to host. That same month, Substack notified users of a data breach that had occurred the previous October, exposing some users’ email addresses, phone numbers, and internal metadata.

Whatever you think about newsletters, independent writers, or the convenience of the platform, these seem like fairly important details to remember when discussing what kind of “independent” infrastructure we are actually supporting and building on. Otherwise, we’re stuck in the Enshittocene: the era in which “the worst ideas of the worst people make the most money.”

The Monetization Question

Let me end with the monetization part. Substack isn’t populated only by professional writers and laid off journalists. It’s full of low-key enthusiasts like me: punks and ordinary folks who simply want somewhere to put their thoughts online and maybe find a few others who care.

The crux of the issue, for me, is replacing one corporate-owned, insatiable content maw with a more curated yet still platform-controlled space where much of the material ends up behind a paywall. On this very website, I’m still struggling with whether it feels right to ask people to support me as an individual creator rather than simply help cover the costs of collectively maintaining our own turf on the web. There are writers at DIY Conspiracy who earn their living from writing elsewhere, and I would love to find a way for their time and dedication here to be compensated too. Until then, maybe Substack, with all its flaws, really is the most practical place for some of them to go.

Getting paid for writing, however, doesn’t necessarily mean locking the writing away. There are other models, even if none of them offers an easy answer to how somebody actually makes a living. Cory Doctorow, mentioned earlier, offers an interesting alternative. He publishes essays for free on his own website under a Creative Commons license, distributes them through RSS and a mailing list, and mirrors them elsewhere, away from Meta but still on platforms like Medium. He makes money from books, speaking engagements, and other paid projects. Of course, an established author’s books and speaking engagements aren’t a ready-made livelihood for a music journalist who has just lost their job.

The basic principle is to spread the work as widely as possible while directing people back toward the parts of the internet you control. Cory is also realistic enough to acknowledge that not every writer can be their own editor, graphic designer, publisher, web administrator, distributor, and salesperson. As mentioned earlier, the problem isn’t the existence of a middleman but becoming dependent on one powerful enough to dictate the relationship between you and your readers.

There are plenty of imperfect middle grounds. You can keep the writing accessible by accepting some controlled advertising, as print zines have historically done with ads from small labels, or by asking for pay-what-you-want support without placing content behind a paywall. You can sell print editions or zines containing your writing and combine those with paid commissions elsewhere. During the Covid pandemic, DIY Conspiracy survived largely by producing and mailing monthly compilation tapes featuring bands from all over the world. The physical tapes sold out fast, while the music remained available digitally on Bandcamp.

None of these options is as frictionless as creating another account on somebody else’s publishing platform, and none guarantees that a writer can actually make a living. Perhaps surviving on the open web has always depended on combining several small sources of income and support rather than handing the whole relationship over to a single gatekeeper.

In my experience, keeping the writing free doesn’t make the work entirely free and easy to produce. Beyond paying various expenses out of one’s own pocket, it often means fitting the work around a nine-to-five job, giving up weekends with family and friends, or relying on support that other people don’t have. A publishing culture open only to people with enough spare time and money has its own large exclusions. That’s part of the problem we need to solve too. When I was younger, I might have told anyone who wasn’t DIY enough or willing to do everything for free to fuck off. These days, I better understand the realities of labor and why people seek some stability in their lives. I also have much more respect for the great work and important campaigns of groups like United Musicians and Allied Workers.

This rant isn’t really about singling out one bad platform. Switching to Beehiiv, Ghost, Buttondown, Medium, or another publishing service doesn’t solve the underlying problem. What we ultimately need is a more democratized internet and a social safety net that gives writers the time and security to do their work, so they aren’t forced to choose between corporate dependence, paywalls, and working for free.

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t want to tell anyone what choices to make. Still, I’m certain that the current economic model, where almost everything is rented and every app, website, or service gives you some crippled basic version until you start paying a monthly or annual subscription, is not the future I want to live in. There’s an important difference between asking readers to support something they value and turning the writing itself into another scarce commodity available only to those paying admission.