Special: three years of Record Store

another one!

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Record Store is three years old. Fittingly, I’ve felt that the newsletter is in its toddler phase, a stage that’s been impressive and frustrating and magical and tough. It’s growing into something I can’t quite name, something altogether new and a bit unlike what I envisioned it might be, but with a life of its own, imbued to it by your readership (thank you).

Reader engagement with Record Store has always been an important aspect of the project to me; I wish I could say that I was writing it for myself, for posterity, but I struggle to see value in creating something that does not mean something to someone, anyone. I enjoy writing most when it’s helping me to connect to people, a conduit for contact. The only thing I love more than comments on these posts is conversation on these posts, seeing people engaging with the work and each other.

This newsletter has seen me through a lot of change in the last year. I graduated college, got a full time job, and released an EP. Record Store was written up in the Guardian, something I knew nothing about until it happened. The effects of that good fortune are still reverberating, as it seems people still read the Guardian—not something you can say about most other publications, according to their parent companies, or benefactors, or the powerful computer-transmitted disease that’s been shuttering media outlets this year. Everyday you log online and read about mass layoffs in journalism, magazines being shut down, criticism losing any sanctioned outlet and forced to turn to the bleak tundra of social media. I dreamed of writing for Pitchfork when I started this newsletter; now I’m forced to imagine a new future in which there is no Pitchfork, no path, no goalpost, and no guarantee.

Is there a future in music journalism? Optimists say that platforms like Substack, with hyper-specific and personalized writing, are the future. I admit that I like the idea of being on the forefront of this wave, but I fear that without some sort of cultural currency, if not real currency, placed on our work, it will gather dust in some corner of the Internet, victim of the flooded marketplace. How do people find these kinds of publications? How do publications keep the people’s attention?

Don’t look away; I’m trying to keep your attention. You’ll notice that Record Store is looking a little younger, a bit more trendy, and for this you must indulge me. It’s become fashionable for artists to change over their images to signal a new “era.” You might call this year a new era of Record Store, one in which the writing is the same but the face is a bit more of me, Amaya.

I resisted putting effort into marketing this newsletter for a long time because I wanted the writing to speak for itself. I’ve realized now that no matter how loud it speaks, it doesn’t hurt me or anyone else to give it a proper platform. I want to see it succeed, and I want it to have a wider reach. I want to engage with the audience that will be the future of music consumption, and my ten minute, Canva mock up wasn’t cutting it. I hope my current readers find this update refreshing, rather than alienating—the content is staying the same.

Although I struggle to keep on keeping on through the onslaught of bad media-related news, not to mention the news-news, I do feel some glimmer of hope around the potential for niche publications like this one to do real work in the journalism space and reach audiences who actually care about supporting them. I have received many kind messages from readers who discover new things about music (and themselves in the process) from Record Store, and even just one of those makes the uncertainty very much worth it. I love engaging with music, and I love engaging with you.

As Record Store moves forward into this year, you’ll be seeing more interviews (spoiler alert: I went on a very nice walk with Laura from Sun June recently to see some bison), more music theory, more thinking, more feeling. You’ll be seeing more Bike Lane, as my many Internet personas converge. You’ll be seeing more varied and in-depth content, as I attempt to expand the Substack tags “music” and “culture” that I’m listed under.

If you’ve subscribed to support my work, thank you. If you’ve made it this far in this publication, this journey of exploration that we’re curating together, thank you. If you’re reading this, thank you.