You're the Reason I Don't Want the World to End

It's never easy to know when, but sadly, all things must pass.

London, England. November 19, 2024.

I.

The last month has been weighing heavy on my mind for a number of converging reasons that have all but seemed to lead to one desperately unwanted conclusion. So for the sake of just taking the Band-Aid off, I should probably just say it now and say it out loud: At the end of this year, Anti-Matter will be going on an indefinite hiatus.

I want to be as transparent as I can be about this, because on some level, I’ve always viewed this as a community experiment—one where the question has always been: Can a community-based readership for this kind of thing grow into a position of objective sustainability? When I first conceived the idea of bringing Anti-Matter back into the world, I set out to resolve that question for myself by using metrics both subjective and objective. I want to walk you through how I thought about this because I think it’s important for the future of every like-minded community project to understand where other initiatives succeeded wildly and where some of them fell just short of the sustainability level, too.

The objective metrics for this iteration of Anti-Matter—what we’ll call “the numbers”—were always going to be about three things to me. The first number, of course, was going to be the sheer number of subscribers. In other words, how many people want to receive this work in the first place? The good news: Over 8,000 at last count, which might not seem like an egregiously huge number, but it becomes more significant when you consider that this means over 8,000 people have invited me into their inboxes twice a week. (Over 13,000 people follow Anti-Matter on Instagram, which shows, to me, that not everyone wants email. This is something I certainly expected.) Being allowed into your inbox is something I never took for granted, something I very much tried to honor and respect. It’s an intimate invitation, and up until this point, it was an unknown for me. No one else in the hardcore scene had ever really attempted to do something of this scale via email. In my mind, then, this was already a success.

The second number adds to this assessment: If you are an email publication of any kind, your open rate is another crucial factor. An open rate, quite simply, is the percentage of email recipients who open an email. There are also direct views, which measure the amount of people who read Anti-Matter from the website. Between the two, Anti-Matter had a clear average of almost 7,000 readers with every email. If you know anything about newsletters or email marketing, you’d be hard-pressed to call an 85% readership anything but a massive win. These first two numbers are really what kept me going.

The third number, however, is the one that nagged me—and to be frank, it’s something I still have trouble reconciling with. When I first conceived this project eighteen months ago, it was always my suspicion that a hardcore audience should outperform the average Substack paid-to-free subscriber ratio. All of the platform documentation set out a basic expectation: The overwhelming majority of Substack newsletters, I discovered, net a ten percent paid-to-free subscriber ratio, regardless of the amount of total subscribers. Maybe it was “support the scene” idealism on my part—or maybe it was hubris—but I believed that the work I would be doing would be unique enough, and hopefully valuable enough, to run closer to the fifteen-to-twenty percent mark. I didn’t think that was so ambitious, and truthfully, I still don’t.

The ratio of paid-to-free subscribers did, at first, outperform the Substack average. But as the profile of Anti-Matter grew, so too did the number of overall subscribers—and sooner than later, the pace of paid subscribers began to hit the Substack average, where it stayed. In and of itself, this number can certainly be viewed as “successful” by many: I managed to earn a net income that certainly allowed me to dedicate time to this work while also playing in Thursday, and despite essentially having two full-time jobs, I enjoyed that work. But I also knew that the “sustainability” of this ratio only worked as long as I had two jobs—and sadly, having two jobs is not actually sustainable for me longterm. I cannot stress enough how much psychological and administrative work goes into Anti-Matter, and even when people told me I needed to work less on it (and many people did!), I was just too committed to maintaining a level of quality that required the attention I gave it. Perhaps that’s on me.

The thing is, it wasn’t actually the revenue that nagged me. While I certainly believe in the economic value of work—and I’ve said as much on multiple occasions—it was the ratio itself, combined with the average number of active readers, that made me question continuing the most. If you applied that ratio to almost any other project, it wouldn’t make sense. For example, imagine hosting a donation-only basement show where only one out of every ten kids took the Chock Full O’Nuts can and pitched in. For lack of a better word, that would just feel weird. As someone who grew up without a lot of money, I’ve always accounted for financial hardship, and I chose the reader-supported model because I believed that we could all help support the project and each other in an equitable way. When I conceived this iteration of Anti-Matter, I believed that I could achieve this goal in the first eighteen months. When I made the decision two weeks ago that Anti-Matter would have to go on hiatus, eighteen months later, I had to admit that things weren’t going in the direction I’d hoped. I just couldn’t find a likely scenario where the scales might suddenly tip the other way, where the coffee can would come back around the room with different results. It started to feel weird.

The Wonder Years. The Upsides Record Release show. The Cobalt Cafe. Canoga Park, CA. January 27, 2010. Photo by Mitchell Wojcik.

II.

Pieces of my life have always spilled into the interviews I do. The subject matter is often a reflection of my own preoccupations at that moment, which I then project onto my conversation partner, trying to expand my own understanding of the things that are on my mind. But when I sat down with Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t have predicted how quickly we would begin talking about how we attempt to consider what makes doing something valuable—and what makes something valuable in the first place.

“I think a lot about our band and the space that we take up,” Dan told me, literally in the first sixty seconds of our conversation, which will be published in full on Thursday. “I truly do not believe in music to be a zero-sum game. I think there’s room for a lot of people to succeed in a lot of different lanes. At the same time, I understand that resources are finite, right? Even resources like clubs: If we want to play a city on a certain night, that means that club is occupied and we’re the ones playing it—and that takes up space that other people could have. When I think in terms of making a record, if you’re working with a record label—especially indie labels—they only have so much money to put out records that year. And if they’re dedicating a certain amount of resources to your band, those are resources they can’t use for other bands. Even the actual physical properties of a vinyl record and the time it takes at the plant. It’s taking up space. And I want to be wary of using our space well. There are a lot of exciting young new bands. So if I feel like we’re not making something that has a real tangible value, then we should get out of the way and let the other new bands make it.”

But how exactly do you measure it? I replied, almost as if I were “asking for a friend.”

“How loud the crowd is when we play the new song,” he laughed. “As simple as that. Do they still want to come see the show? And when we play the new songs, do people sing them as loud as the old songs? Do I see them viscerally reacting to them?”

For as much as we’d like to have wholly creative reasons for doing anything, there are always going to be subjective personal considerations that underlie the motive. Dan and I, for one thing, are both former educators. That he measures his own value in “taking up space” by units of enthusiasm, participation, and overall usefulness is not surprising, then; as a college lecturer, I often gauged my own performance by these very same things. Becoming a teacher is never going to be a decision that’s motivated by money—there is none, of course!—so the value of our work must be an intangible mix of, dare I say, vibes. When I talk about “the numbers,” I only care about them insomuch as they give me insight into the vibes. Do they point towards enthusiasm? Are they indicative of momentum? Does the lopsided ratio mean that thousands of readers love what I do, but only if it’s free?

Unfortunately, there is no perfect way to answer any of these questions. There is only experience and instinct and the trust you have in yourself to make the call.

III.

Before I say anything else: To everyone who became a paid subscriber, in any capacity, I cannot thank you enough. It was your generosity and commitment to this idea that allowed me to create a body of work that I am inestimably proud to have put forth into the world. It was your enthusiasm and participation and visceral reaction that made me feel like something like this was even possible. I am greatly indebted to you. You took a chance on me, and I can only hope you feel I delivered.

Some of you may have noticed that I quietly disabled paid subscriptions last week, before the Knocked Loose interview went live. If you have a paid or recurring subscription, you shouldn’t be charged again. The question remains, then: What happens next?

First of all, please don’t unsubscribe! In the immediate future, I have a couple of “issues” planned for December that are works in progress, but will hopefully round the year out on a strong note. I will also use this list (sparingly, I promise!) to announce any new developments on Anti-Matter’s future.

Indeed, as far as a more distant future goes, I am calling it a “hiatus” in the same way that it was a hiatus when Anti-Matter fanzine became a compilation record. And then again when that compilation record became an Anti-Matter column in Punk Planet. And then again when that column morphed into an anthology book. And then again when that book turned into this. Anti-Matter has always been an idea and a way of thinking about hardcore for me, and I will continue to find new forms for it. If anything, keeping this iteration as an eighteen-month capsule collection inspires new ideas in and of itself. Maybe this all belongs in print. Maybe there’s a way to merge thirty years into a bookended capsule of its own. I am considering all of it.

But in the end, how I measure sustainability for this project is ultimately a personal decision. It’s not anyone’s “fault” and there isn’t a truly objective way to measure it in totality. We accomplished something together, you and I, dear reader, and now we are following its inevitable transformation. As a wise young punk poet once said, “Drink deep. It’s just a taste. And it might not come this way again.”

Coming on Thursday to Anti-Matter: A conversation with Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years.

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