It’s about this time of the year when, always rather belatedly, we realise that we’ve reached another anniversary in the life of this strange, draining, and at times beautiful baby of ours, The Quietus. Aside from the gig featuring Factory Floor, Teeth Of The Sea, East India Youth, Perc and Grumbling Fur that we held on our fifth birthday we’ve never really been ones for parping our own horn or wasting money on parties – instead, like the parsimonious Methodists of cultural criticism, we’d rather get on with the producing great writing for you, our readers and loyal adherents, to enjoy. Since we launched The Quietus in the summer 2008 we’ve remained steadfast in our independence. We have no financial backers and, in industry-wide difficult times for the display advertising that comprises our sole source of revenue, have refused to go down the path of clickbait to an inane hell of endless articles and Think Pieces on insignificant tittle-tattle.
First of all, we’d like to thank you for reading The Quietus. You are what keep us going and motivated in those long, bleak times when we’ve run out of Yorkshire Tea and the only music that’s been sent in the post is seemingly made by sad lads doing impersonations of grieving dolphins.
We feel proud to have been doing longform before it was a hashtag and brought you some of the best music criticism published in the past seven years in our Quietus Interviews, Black Sky Thinking opinion pieces and Quietus Essay investigations.
We’ve tried to bring you the best new music in our reviews, Escape Velocity interviews and columns on rap, jazz, grime, metal, punk, hardcore, pop, electronic music, cassettes and the rum outer reaches. And of course we don’t believe that music exists in splendid cultural isolation, which is why we have our ever-popular sections on cinema and literature, with regular coverage of visual art to follow this autumn.
Ever since we started The Quietus as an independent operation it has been our stated aim that eventually we will pay for all the writing that we publish on the site. This is still the case – our contributors are among the best out there, put a huge amount of time and energy into their work for us, and we want to make sure they’re all rewarded for it. Over the past couple of years we’ve steadily increased the article types we pay for, something we’re keen to continue doing. Nobody in The Quietus office earns anywhere near a minimum wage for what we’re doing, and we all have second and third jobs in order to keep going. Our priority is always to increase the amount we pay writers, over and above ourselves. We’re also currently updating the site to make it far more user-friendly, and to enable us to bring in lots of new features, including subscription memberships with special benefits and powers and a Quietus shop. All of these changes will enable us to further boost traffic and develop new revenue streams that we can then use to reach our goal of paying for every single piece of writing that goes up on the site.
This is where you come in: over the past year or so, more and more of you have told us that you’d gladly financially contribute to the running of The Quietus. This seems to be part of a growing awareness among wiser internet users that online doesn’t, and can’t, always mean free. We’ve therefore decided to make a support function via PayPal for anyone who wants to put their money where their mouth is. Anything you give – 100% of it – will go directly towards paying our freelance contributors or technical costs, not a penny will go to Quietus staff. So no brogues for Turner, and after extensive therapy John has admitted that he has enough Sunn 0))) t-shirts. The button to take you to PayPal is below, and there’s the option to make a one-off donation or something more regular, like a magazine subscription if you will. Even the monthly price of an ale will go a long way.
To all those of you who put the idea to do this into our heads, thank you. For those of you about to donate, we heartily thank you too.
John Doran, Luke Turner, Laurie Tuffrey, Sophie Coletta, Christian Eede, Mat Colegate, Karl Smith, September 2015.
