Hello everyone,

Thank you for giving a toss about the site! Our little social campaign, and your overwhelming show of support saved us a lot of headache. Now we need to figure out a way to not be so dependent on non-transparent and seemingly arbitrary systems outside of our control. We want to build our mailing list in the event something like this happens again, which is entirely possible, even inevitable. Please sign up here!

The lifespans of social media platforms are finite, so we’d rather focus our energy on connecting directly with a dedicated audience rather than chase ultimately unproductive and fleeting social media networks for ‘exposure’. We’ve a few bigger projects planned this year and the following that we’re really excited to share, so the focus is going to be on realising those things, as well as building sustainable income streams to support our online editorial and community engagement.

As we’ve said many times before, we rely entirely on our core volunteer in-house team—myself, Matt, Jared and Caroline—to run the site, which means all the writing we do, for every release, interview, premiere, photo gallery etc, is done with little to no compensation. What we do make through our Patreon goes to pay site running costs and our very nominal writing fees. We’d like to raise those fees, commission more and even pay ourselves one day. Please consider donating to the site or subscribing to our Patreon to ensure the future of AQNB and its mission to promote and support good and interesting art and music. 

That’s it for now, and there’ll be more about another compendium, a cassette release, more merch collaborations and a long overdue anthology publication marking ten years as a site in 2022—funded in part by a very generous NFT sale donation from our friend and website graphic designer David Rudnick. More on all that soon. 

Thanks again. It was so heartening to see the response to our call in the last few days. We really do appreciate it.  

Love, 

Steph K <3