A Lull in Traffic
The fall of Pitchfork won't directly rattle the hardcore scene, but there's a bigger story here about why so many music media models fail—and it should concern all of us.
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Look up. Wherever you’re reading this, you should see something about Anti-Matter being “a reader-supported publication.” In its current form, this is 100 percent true. What fascinates me now, though, is that the original Anti-Matter fanzine in the ‘90s was not exactly that. The lore about how I once “made a living”—and that’s a generous description of it—from publishing a fanzine is also true. But reader support was only one part of the puzzle back then.
Over the years, I’ve been asked a lot: How the hell did you pull that off? The answer was almost always: math. The first thing I did was invest every last cent I had into publishing the first issue. That came to roughly $2,500, which was a lot of money for a nineteen-year-old in 1993. There wer…