Posted by When I started this music publication almost 24 years ago the number one was song was “How You Remind Me” (it’s an 8) and, much like Nickelback, stereogum.com is somehow still around. But things are gonna look different and work better starting today.
In 2020, upon taking back control of this site from the company that acquired it from another company, I did all things you’re supposed to do to diversify revenue, which had come 100% from advertising: writing a newsletter, building a merch shop, adding affiliate links, partnering on live events, and most importantly launching a paid subscription program. Things were looking great, with Stereogum becoming the most popular standalone music website in America according to Comscore. Traffic and revenue increased every year.
We would not be in business without our community of paying members (thank you!) but a lot has changed in five years, and some new obstacles have made the outlook for web publishers particularly dire. Advertising still accounts for the vast majority of Stereogum’s revenue (hit us up if you would like to advertise!) but starting this year the so-called “media traffic apocalypse” caused by Google’s pivot to AI search has cut our ad revenue by 70%. Prior to that, Facebook and X’s deprioritization of links hurt too, but I can’t downplay the brutal impact of AI Overview.
We don’t want to rely on these AI-riddled platforms for referral traffic, and fortunately we still have millions of monthly readers who visit directly. But we need more of you to pay to sustain this operation. Today’s relaunch was done with that as its goal. Before I tell you about the new user experience, here are some of our wins since relaunching as an independent publication:
- As mentioned, we hit new a traffic record every year since 2020.
- We introduced nearly 200 new voices to the site, most of whom had never written for us before. We pay all freelancers within one week of receiving their invoice. No one is allowed to contribute to Stereogum for free.
- For the first time we licensed Stereogum IP for a streaming pilot currently in development with a well-known production company. (This doesn’t mean it’ll get picked up, but heyyy.)
- We produced or partnered on new events in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Austin, and other cities.
- We nabbed a key endorsement from Linkin Park.
The new website you’re looking at is powered by Lede, Alley’s publishing platform behind thriving reader-funded sites like Defector, Racket, and Racquet. Lede offers the kind of all-in-one toolset that we wanted for our last relaunch but didn’t exist yet. We’d been struggling with an archaic, piecemeal tech solution that had been the bane of my existence. Now we are ready for a big paid membership drive.
Go ahead and subscribe right now! It’s much easier than before, since we are no longer using multiple software programs that didn’t always work nicely together. Unfortunately there are many of you whose credit cards were not saved in Stripe when we moved to this new system. So if you were already a subscriber, make sure your payment details migrated. If you already paid for an annual subscription within the past year, the system will recognize that and you won’t be charged double. (Related: if you received an email from us within the past day with the subject “Thanks for signing up, Jane!” please ignore it. I forgot to change a default in our new email provider when we imported everyone.)
Stereogum Membership will get you an invite to the world’s best music Discord, where everyone is very kind and funny. Gumcord users share music recommendations and industry intel, meet up at concerts, and play Music League. They post only the most esoteric Autechre memes and, on Fridays, photos of their pets.
You’ll also get access to members-only Stereogum articles as a paid subscriber, and going forward more of our content will be exclusive for these readers. Along with the popular series The Alternative Number Ones, our Album Of The Week will now be members-only, as will our monthly genre columns for pop, metal, jazz, rap, and electronic music. One programming change: While The Number Ones will remain free for all readers on Mondays, it will now alternate weeks with The Alternative Number Ones column on Wednesdays. We are doing this so we don’t too quickly reach the present day and the Shinedown era, respectively, and because our small staff is currently overloaded.
Subscribers also get access to the Members Only playlist, an expanded version of our Favorite New Music playlist that lives on Spotify and Apple Music. We listen to hundreds of new songs every week and put the best ones there.
And subscribers will be able to comment on our articles. Commenting privileges are now for paying readers only. With Lede’s help we went to great lengths to not only reformat 20+ years of articles, but imported your ancient comments about Passion Pit. Paywalled commenting was overdue — it will prevent spambots and jerks from ruining conversations and save me time attempting to moderate them. The commenting software is different now, and will work better.
The VIP tier is the same as the Member tier, except it also removes all ads from the site. This is the reading experience you want imo! If you were previously a Member, today is a great day to upgrade to VIP: That is now a totally seamless process.
The monthly Member tier and VIP tier prices are now $1 more than they were when we introduced them five years ago. The cost for running this site and for paying its contributors has gone up since 2020 — we actually increased our rates for all freelance submissions early this year — and $6/$11 per month is more in line with the cost of membership on sites/newsletters/podcasts that offer a lot less for your money. We published over 120 longform artist interviews last year, for example. This year we interviewed everyone from Agriculture to Raekwon to Lady Gaga.
We are also adding a third tier for big spenders. It’s called All Access and it costs $99/month. We were advised to have an expensive tier in case any of you are rich admirers who want to give your money away, shorties support independent music journalism. You can see the perks for that here.
On all tiers, you’ll get a discount if you sign up for annual membership instead of monthly. There’s also now a tip jar linked in the main menu that you can click anytime you’re feeling generous. And we now finally offer gift subscriptions, which many of you asked for.
If you already spent all your money on 34 The Life Of A Showgirl variants, you will still be able to access this site. After a certain number of articles, however, you’ll be asked to register with an email address and, eventually, to subscribe to lift the paywall.
Your money enables us to pay the writers, photographers, videographers, and designers who produce work for Stereogum. We have other expenses too. Sometimes we are hit with SLAPP lawsuits or threats over copyrighted images our old sister site Videogum (R.I.P.) posted 15 years ago. Sometimes scammers test stolen credit cards on our merch site and then we have to deal with penalty fees for chargebacks.
Since it is 2025 we do a lot more than publish written features. We are producing more videos these days and hope to do more and bigger live events. I recently hired an on-camera correspondent to star in vertical videos and get us more coverage on TMZ. Making social videos cost money, but increasingly it’s the only way to get access to artists outside of Cameo.
Our mission has always been to discuss all kinds of new and old music in a knowledgable and irreverent voice. With a very small staff, we publish 365 days a year, and we write whatever we want. Stereogum receives thousands of unsolicited music pitches a week, so I cannot reply to them all, but mostly we spend our days championing emerging artists no one has heard of yet. I am frequently told about artists getting signed because we covered them here. If we write about established pop stars, it’s because we want to (no major labels advertise on Stereogum). We have never accepted money to write about an artist.
We don’t chase algorithms and our writers don’t even have access to traffic reporting. We don’t advertise Stereogum and we don’t buy followers. We don’t do random product recommendations.
Stereogum does not use generative AI. But these days we compete for readership with AI-generated articles while our content gets scraped by LLMs. It sucks, but we think there is still a future for journalism made by human music nerds.
I tried to make the new site look similar to the last iteration so as not to hit you with too much change at once. But now all the bugs are gone and it loads faster. If you ever emailed Stereogum about a technical problem with the website, you got a response from me, usually within an hour, and hopefully I’ll get fewer of those emails now. The navigation is better and you won’t have to log in over and over or deal with the CAPTCHA we had to deter spambots. A few modules (like Heavy Rotation and The Number Ones year pulldowns) had to be discontinued for the new platform, but there’s also added functionality like a dark mode option.
I hope you like the new user experience and choose to support us. I’ll be in the comments answering questions!
