Unfolding the Free Sheet

Since starting out in Bristol over a decade ago, Crack Magazine has always been invested in finding new ways to tell stories, engage our audience and move the needle in music journalism. In recent years, we have been drawn to the ways in which this journalism can be elevated by adopting groundbreaking technology.

For example, back in 2017, we launched a landmark Aphex Twin cover story that blended a traditional print profile with augmented reality and a rollout that included geotagged content in locations around the globe. It was a watershed moment for us and it provided a route map for how we could use accessible technology alongside narrative. Following this, we continued to develop our content in new and unexpected ways.

When the pandemic happened, like so many other publications, Crack Magazine was forced to halt its monthly print run and recalibrate as a digital-only publication. Our hand may have been forced but, suddenly, concepts that had long existed in the abstract took on a tangibility. Here was an opportunity to reassess our relationship with our audience and create a subscriber-first magazine, operating at the intersection of publishing and tech. Out of financial necessity, and like many of our peers within the creative and publishing sector, the magazine launched Supporters, essentially a digital subscriber model. This new approach was completely alien to us as a publication whose reputation was predicated on being a free magazine, accessible to all.

Perhaps, it is not surprising that one of our first issues of the digital magazine spotlighted rising, visionary artists from various undergrounds, from Berlin to Chile. Intentionally or not, the choice of cover stars echoed Crack’s newfound status, poised on the brink and launching into unchartered territory. And while we weren’t quite sure what a digital magazine could be, we knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a PDF or a design skeuomorph, where design attempts to emulate the printed page.

Instead, we began to think of a digital magazine in terms of a hub or a testing ground; a space where we could integrate innovative technologies into features in a seamless way. Perhaps, it could be a place to build a dialogue, destabilising the hierarchies of print media by staging a two-way conversation, or a conversation that doesn't include us, the editors, at all. Perhaps its vestigial magazine-ness, its essence, lies simply in the fact that these cutting edge experiences appear in one place, month after month, curated by Crack Magazine.

These were the ideas that were percolating in my mind when I joined the amplified publishing cohort, loaded with a question that I kept intentionally, perhaps naively, broad; How can we evolve our brand to incorporate new publishing mediums alongside our existing content?

As an editor, I am fascinated by narrative and voice and I love a clear brief. It was alarming, then, that my own research threads and throughlines spun off into tangents. All of them were captivating but, ultimately, a little too ambitious. I found myself coming back to four core prompts:

1. How can we use new and innovative publishing models to elevate the stories we tell and give value to our audience – with the ambition of winning their long term support?

2. How can we personalise and tailor content/homepages for users within the Supporters hub, build community and make Supporters feel they have a stake in what we do?

3. Is it possible to create a space that reconciles accessibility with exclusivity – does the very existence of a walled garden undermine what Crack is?

4. Is it desirable to use technology to redefine or explore the relationship between journalist and readers when, perhaps, what readers of music journalism want is curation, editorial voice and expertise? Where is the room to play within these defined lines and where are they fixed?

In exploring these questions, I have encountered ideas that speak to what we are doing, in both direct and indirect ways. I have been drawn to the way that The Athletic not only customises content delivery, depending on user preference, but also the way the publication cleverly knits together editorial voice with community discussion. It certainly suggests that the phenomenon of digital campfires, a concept articulated by digital brand strategist Sara Wilson, is going to become more and more integral to publishing brands. This is seen most overtly in the wholesale embrace of the group-chat app Discord and across a vast swathe of content creators eager to stoke discussion and foster community across niche topics. In realms adjacent to Crack Magazine, there seems to be a real drive to engage audiences by inviting them to shape the content being published, for example in the way platforms are inviting audiences to be involved in the content they enjoy such as in a recent callout for field recordings by NTS.

We are only just beginning to parse all these ideas and sift through the wealth of emergent concepts and trends that are applicable to Crack Magazine. The next stage is to take the temperature of the music industry, via a survey, in a bid to bring this out of the abstract. We also want to extend our dialogue with Supporters in the hope that we can use our position as one of the biggest independent music magazines as a force for good, while providing the music journalism and curation for which we are known. In short, the desire to tell compelling stories has always been at the heart of what we do and we are still writing our own.