Hello again! I‘ve got some New Year’s housekeeping: I am pivoting the newsletter and splitting it into 2 separately subscribable sections.
If you’re interested in all the content I send, you can close this email right now! 🙌🏽
If you want to limit the content or learn what the sections are, please read on.
⬆️ “Pivoting” with slightly higher stakes, as seen on HBO’s “Silicon Valley”
The Choice Is Yours
If you tap the frighteningly named “Unsubscribe” button at the bottom of this email, it will take you to a page where you can choose which sections you want to stay subscribed to:
“Alej.HipHop & Tech” Section
This was the original purpose of this newsletter:
An infrequent way to let people know whenever I post new projects or breakdowns on alej.hiphop
“Weekly Hip-Hop & Tech” (WHHAT) Section
This is what the newsletter became last year:
A weekly collection of music and stories with a focus on at least one unique, interesting, and fun bit of hip-hop technology or technique
I suggest staying subscribed to both of course, but the choice is yours!
Post-Script: Why another newsletter anyways?
Since starting this, I’ve noticed people promoting newsletters everywhere. Here are my reasons:
(Aside from the reasons below, I also just really like newsletters because they are a break from social media feeds which have gotten really good at capturing attention and time).
I started this newsletter to avoid relying on any single platform to share the things I make, especially because of the mixed experience I had letting people know about my hip-hop websites in 2017.
On one hand, I found a large audience sharing Everybody Cover on Reddit. On the other hand, Reddit moderators removed every link posted by my Migos Adlibs collaborator, leading us to switch to promoting the site on Twitter.
While we did find a large audience on Twitter, you can still never predict what a platform’s algorithms will prioritize. For example, I originally launched this newsletter on Revue, a site which was owned by Twitter. However last year Twitter shut down Revue following its mass layoffs. This led me and many others to switch to Substack, only for Twitter to de-prioritize and mark Substack links as unsafe and un-retweetable because of their “business disagreements” with Substack.
Long story short, relying on a single platform just doesn’t seem as reliable as direct communication with your audience.
Thank you all for being subscribers! Now I’m going back to making cool things 🙏🏽.
Peace!