Lots of effort and curation go into these, so we want to spend some extra time highlighting our work in the coming weeks. Following the launch of our 10th printed magazine. I'd like to explore 10-lessons we've learned from this project.

1. Moving away from traditional journalism

It’s important for me to make sure we’re moving towards something we want. Being brutally honest, when I look at established and successful magazines in the wider world, I don’t see something that I aspire. Magazines have gotten an increasingly bad reputation, and rightly so due to the prevalence of ads, clickbait, top-down business hierarchy, and a general disconnect between what they explore and those they invite to explore it.

In this case, I need to ask: As a magazine, where do we want to be moving?

2. Build a process around the failures

Being process-heavy creates bottlenecks; that’s why we’re constantly reassessing which projects need them. Time-sensitive and high-stakes tasks like our prints are heavily dependent on a process. A simple thing can hold up or interfere with the chain of requirements, making sure that we have high-quality assets, things are proofread, and confirmed with any writer, artist, label, or management involved. These are all things that are pretty hard to wing.

On the other hand, team communication, social media, and big-picture stuff are held pretty loosely as far as process is concerned. These are things that need to be ad-hoc for creativity.

3. The value in long-form representation

Just because fast-paced content is popular doesn’t mean it reflects our collective attention span. I’d like to challenge those who think a 20-second short is more valuable than a long-form email. Long-form favours exploring a topic more deeply, and we intend to do so.

4. Documenting our findings

Early on, we didn’t know how much of our behind-the-scenes we should highlight. Showing how the sausage is made isn’t generally “cool,” but we’ve had a lot of fun and interest in documenting things as we go along. If you’re reading this, thanks for reinforcing this. I’m no longer interested in overly ominous branding and distant communication. Anyone working on a life-long project has valuable things to offer through transparency and documentation.

Additionally, we’ve found value in sharing works that inspire us from outside our ecosystem.

Side note: We also open-sourced our website’s codebase for anyone wanting to snoop around.

5. Striking a balance

This has been a tough one; and as the types of people reading our prints diversify further, the issue persists. Balancing each domain and even the length of any piece within our prints has been challenging. We’re still figuring out the flow, but we’ve found some joy in mixing this up pretty evenly thus far.

6. What you build vs. what people use are entirely different

Damn. When we launched our subscription, it originally had many different tabs for Samples, Dubpacks, Tutorials, Exclusive articles, Gallery stuff. After a year or so, we noticed that only a small portion of each was being fully downloaded.

A big part of why people support us is for the fewer bigger things we do.

We realize that by trying to diversify so much, we may have fallen victim to not spending more time on fewer things and doing them better. 2024 marks a shift here as we restructure our output and remember what people enjoy from us curatively.

We spent so long building out features to realize the thing we offer the most value on was here this whole time.

7. Say no

I may stand alone in this, but I see value in saying no. When you develop relationships with artists, labels, and PR in this space, it’s easy to fall into the trap of support-bias, saying yes to something for the sake of a relationship. Sometimes it’s important to turn things down and focus on where we’d like to progress.

Every yes is a no to something else. I like to think people enjoy our content not because of the quantity of output, but the quality; and treading that line is important in this saturated world.

8. 80/20 rule

Over-planning isn’t fun, and jumping before you are “ready” is better than never. We’ve internalized some ways to know when to pull the trigger with a project. It’s saved us a lot of time worrying. There’s always scope to improve for the next one!

9. Keeping things simple

Ultimately, this is a small project, and a small team. Keeping things simple and reducing abstraction is an important part of it. Moving in this space, we’re ready to adopt any new thing, but even more ready to drop something that doesn’t work or takes up too much mental capacity.

10. Why we're doing this?

Speaks for itself. This project should be fun, and while there are periods of blood and sweat, the overall experience should be an enjoyable one. I don’t expect anyone to spend time working with us if they’d rather not, and I’d like this project to represent something positive for all involved.

As we look ahead to the next 10 prints, I hope we—as a team—can continue on this path. There's still so much happening in this space, and we want to address the convergence of art, music, and tech away from the noise.

Here's to making that happen.