It’s now five years since we launched our subscription platform with Steady in a last-ditch attempt to save The Quietus during the desperate Covid crisis. Thankfully, we raised enough to temporally keep the wolves from the door, and the website is still here to celebrate its seventeenth birthday. SEVENTEEN! We can barely believe that we’ve made it through infancy, childhood, the difficult mid-teen years, and are legally old enough (in the UK at least) to head out onto the highways and byways, L-Plates on. However, we’re currently just below 2000 subscribers, and – at the very least – we really need to hit that number to carry on operating at full power through the rest of 2025, and into the future. We’d really appreciate as many of you as possible becoming subscribers to help us commission and pay for editorial that is guaranteed to be written by human beings and not AI churning bots. If you’re not already a subscriber, here is a delicious temptation for you to sample the luxury of expanded Subscriber Plus tier.
As our relationship with Steady (the good people who run our subscriptions) has developed, we’ve spent more and more time listening to what YOU want. For five years, we sent out a monthly download of music commissioned by tQ, but after 60 releases, it’s time for a change. What we keep on being told is that everyone is hungry for more playlists. Your wish is our command! For the Subscriber Plus tier, the single roundup playlists will now be bolstered by an extra seven especially curated playlists per month. This antidote to the algorithm will all be featured alongside our editorial and sent out in email updates and can be found on the site here, with a selection from:
Interviews: Think of this as the best possible compilation of tracks from our most loved artists, covering must hear bangers, deep cuts, rarities and fan favourite anthems.
Baker’s Dozen: A sonic accompaniment to our most popular feature – eavesdrop on the soundtrack that helped shape the life of each of our Baker’s Dozen artists.
Strange World Of: We give you 20 points of entry into a cult artist back catalogue that might have formerly felt too overwhelming or massive or off-putting to navigate before.
The Subscriber Plus tier members of course receive all the other perks – the Low Culture Podcast (John and Luke with the occasional special guest dissecting key cultural artefacts), Low Culture Essay (our favourite writers on the moving and mindwarping culture that has helped define their lives) and Organic Intelligence newsletter (a shopping list or must hear guide to some of the weirdest and wildest musical movements out across the world). We’re launching this new feature with 39 brand new playlists from 39 core Quietus artists to go with archive editorial – sign up as a Subscriber Plus member and get instant access to these here. These playlists are all delivered via Qobuz, TIDAL, Deezer, Apple Music and Spotify.
We can’t stress enough that the only way that tQ will survive towards its 21st birthday will be the continuing support of our subscribers, and we’d love it if you could be part of the heroic and fragrant 1% of our readers that we need to put their hands in their pockets for this to happen.
We’d also like to thank all the artists who helped us by recording music for tQ’s subscribers over the past five years.
Thanks to you all for keeping us Black Sky Thinking,
From Luke, John and all at tQHQ.
