Earlier this year, for the first time in No Depression’s 22 years, we became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Now, as a nonprofit niche music publication, we quite literally cannot continue to make our quarterly journal and run this website without your support. So I’m writing today to ask for your help.
From now until June 15, we’re running a subscription drive to get us to 7,000 subscribers. That will be a threshold at which No Depression can not only continue to print our quarterly journals full of exclusive-to-print longform music writing, but also continue providing you with the news, reviews, and columns you’ve become accustomed to on this (free-to-you) website.
Rather than take the site behind a paywall and significantly diminish the quality of the print journal, we’ve set a goal for ourselves that we believe is attainable. We’ve also shifted our subscription offering to just $6 per month. Subscribe now, cancel when you want. Regardless, that $6 per month will help us keep the lights on here — it’ll also get you every upcoming issue of our print journal.
So, if you love No Depression, will you please just take a moment and subscribe for $6 per month? (To cover the cost of international shipping, it’ll be $8 per month in Canada and $10 per month elsewhere in the world.)
As you may know, No Depression began as a print magazine in 1995 and enjoyed a 13-year run on newsstands. It won awards and developed a loyal following. Then, in 2008, its founders took it out of print as the music industry changed and record labels had to cut their advertising budgets. Thus began our tenure as an online-only publication. After the FreshGrass Foundation took the reins in 2014, we brought the magazine back into print as a thick, book-like, ad-free quarterly journal even as we kept the website going, separately.
Within the past year, we’ve become nonprofit, launched a No Depression writing fellowship and a No Depression Singer-Songwriter Award, and made seven journals that have told the deep stories of artists as variant as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Levon Helm, Dolly Parton, Dori Freeman, Chicago Farmer, and Janka Nabay. In print, we’ve also presented essays by Robbie Fulks, Alison Brown, Mary Gauthier, Amy Ray, Leigh Gibson (of the Gibson Brothers), Allison Moorer, Charlie Parr, and many more.
Though in different ways, the new No Depression in print — much like the thinner mag by the same name that preceded it — is a very special thing, unlike any other music magazine you might pick up.
We’ve amassed a small pool of loyal, incredible subscribers, but we need a lot more to make this work. Will you please subscribe today?
If you’re still not sure, we’ll be publishing articles from the print journal online during this drive, so you can see what kind of deeply researched, thoroughly edited, engaging stories you’ve been missing in print. I firmly believe these stories were born to be on paper. See what you think and subscribe, and you’ll receive our summer/international issue; our upcoming “Foremothers” issue; a special edition for winter that focuses on songwriting via deep discussion with folks like Ani DiFranco, Iron & Wine, the Avett Brothers, and Josh Ritter; and other issues to come.
In the meantime, thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and for taking any time to ever read anything from No Depression. We believe that smart discourse about great music matters, and we know you agree.
