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Business News Digital Media
The Quietus launches new subscription packages
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 1 September 2020
The Quietus has announced a new subscription offering that it hopes will help the music website to continue operating in the long-term.
It’s one of a number of music websites shifting over to a subscription model after the COVID-19 shutdown caused a slump in advertising sales. Given that most music magazines were already struggling to generate enough revenues from an advertising market where most digital spend ends up with Google and Facebook, that slump put a lot of music media – online and in print – at risk.
Noting that The Quietus is celebrating its twelfth birthday today, the site’s editors, John Doran and Luke Turner, wrote in an editorial piece: “If you had asked us a few months ago we would have told you that we weren’t looking forward to this date. To be blunt, most of our birthdays have been overshadowed by the question: ‘How the hell are we going to keep this magazine afloat for another year?'”
“The past year, however, has been the most difficult in the history of the site”, they went on. “The magazine and website advertising system – which was already in dire shape – has been shoved into outright catastrophic collapse by the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of this has been felt right across the ecosystem that The Quietus is part of, resulting in the presses being turned off or paused on many brilliant and widely-read print magazines, not to mention a huge scaling back in operations by many digital titles”.
“There’s every chance The Quietus would have folded too”, they admit, “were it not for an Arts Council England grant which has seen us through the past few tough months. Despite the grinding awfulness of the year so far, however, we’re actually starting to feel cautiously optimistic about the future. We’ve spent the summer working round the clock to use this modest but bacon-saving award to come up with the biggest development in the history of the site”.
And that big development is the launch of The Quietus subscription service. There are three options available, with the top level offering subscribers music as well as music journalism, with the site set to commission artists to create original tracks. Those commissions will either be “collaborations between two artists who have never worked together before or new music from one of our favourites”.
You’ll find more information on it all here.
