My Musical New Years Resolutions
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a peaceful festive break. I cooked a big dinner for family, eat too much, drank too much, and didn’t listen to anywhere near enough music.
Some quick housekeeping - In Strict Tempo can now be found at instricttempo.com - the old Substack address will keep working too, but hopefully this will make it easier to share.
One thing I see a lot of on social media is how can we - fans- fix the music industry? Nearly always that boils down to one thing: pay more for stuff. But life’s difficult enough as it is right now, with the cost of seemingly everything on the rise so that’s not always the answer. Of course it would be great if Spotify paid everyone £1 per stream and artists got massive booking fees from shows and festivals, but that’s simply not gonna happen. All we can do is do our best to make things better and more sustainable right? Here’s my musical new years resolutions for 2025:
Sell Some Records
I’ve got 000’s of records knocking around my house and in a storage container that I just don’t listen to any more and I want to get rid of. Maybe I should practice what I preach and try to sell some of these myself. I’d love my own record shop, but that’s not really practical. I should probably list them on Discogs really.
Support Music Journalism More
Music journalism is in dire straits right now, so instead of just moaning about it I’ve decided to finally get round to supporting a couple of publications that I’ve been meaning to for a while now. I already subscribe to a few Substacks, and I periodically change which ones I pay for as it’s not really feasible to pay for all of them every month. So I’ve put my money where my mouth is and taken out a paid subscription to The Quietus and another to Hearing Things. On top of my long-running subscription to The Wire this should see me through the next year of reading.
Release More Music
Easier said than done. I’m not a musician, I probably never will be. I’ve had no music training, I blagged my way through the composition module of my degree (who knew graphic scores would come in handy one day?) but I know my way round a DAW. Last year I made a track that was released on a charity compilation by Industrial Coast - it’s long sold out and not available digitally, but honestly you’re not missing much. It was a very raw noise remix of Tom Robinson Band’s 2-4-6-8 Motorway. Maybe I’ll put it on Soundcloud if I’m allowed. But yeah, this year - I’m going to try and make some more music, or put out some other peoples music. Maybe I’ll record a couple of mixes. Just don’t hold it against me if I don’t do any of this in 2025.
Use Bluesky More, Use Twitter Less
I loved Twitter. I really did. But over the past couple of years it’s become a cesspit, and that’s got even worse since Musk took over. It’s kinda pointless trying to share links on there now, they just get hidden, the non-chronological order it shows you stuff means it’s useless for trying to follow football, and it’s just populated with utter dickheads. You wouldn’t spend long in a pub if it was full or loudmouth right-wingers, so I’m going to be using Twitter a lot less this year. I don’t know if I necessarily need to replace one social media platform with another, but I’m going to try and post more on Bluesky this year: you can find me there at vinylperez.bsky.social
Grow & Improve In Strict Tempo
I’ve been writing this newsletter for over a year now, and almost 200 of you subscribe to it. I’d love to grow that number even further in 2025 so if you enjoy it please share it with others you think might like it. As I’ve mentioned I’ve got one or two In Strict Tempo offline projects in the works, and I know I keep saying it but I really hope to be able to share the first of those with you very soon - I think you’ll like it.
As it’s the start of a new year I’m interested in hearing your feedback on In Strict Tempo - do you want more reviews? fewer reviews? more industry stuff? more practical tips on releasing/pushing music? more tapes, even if there’s no digital? mixes? playlists on Apple Music/BuyMusicClub? Let me know and I’ll do my best to accomodate.
There’s no new music playlist this week as you’d have to be mad to release something on the 3rd of January but here’s a link to my Best of 2024 list which was published on Boomkat (and with some additional context from me here) - 27 tracks of great music.