Get in Losers, We're Learning About New Music

Whether you're an old head, a new band, both, or neither -- if you've found yourself disillusioned with new music & want to change that, you're in the right place.

Need me to get to the point faster? Cool:

1. “WTF do you do here exactly?”

2. “Why TF should I pay?”

3. Times are tough — pay what you can.

I started this newsletter for people who stopped keeping up with new music.

There is so, so much new music. I completely understand why it feels overwhelming to sift through it, and why it’s so easy to get disillusioned with it.

100,000 new songs get uploaded to streaming services every single day. That’s an impossible number.

• Back in your day, the radio played good music.

• Back in your day, MTV was actually good. 120 minutes existed and played banger after banger for, well, two hours at a time.

• Back in your day, music recommendations came from your friends, from (paper!) magazines, from your friendly local record store clerks, from somebody you actually knew.

Now you’re stuck with algorithmically generated slop and 6-second viral TikTok hits on loop.

I get why it feels so gloomy and soulless now, but I promise you — there is no shortage of great music now.

New music isn’t the problem - you just need someone to curate it for you.

Remember having “that one music friend” who always had the perfect recommendation, seemingly out of nowhere? The one who made incredible, personalized mixtapes?

Maybe you were that friend, but now you have kids and a mortgage and a soul-crushing office job.

It’s okay. It’s normal. We get old. We get other hobbies. There’s only so much time in the day.

I’m here to fill some of the void left by the perfect music curation outlets we had when we were growing up.

I’m here to be “that one music friend,” if you’ll have me.

“What would you say you do here?”

• I draw connections between new artists and the older artists they’re inspired by, so that you can hear the similarities for yourself:

If You Like [X] Then You'll Like [Y]

• I introduce you to new artists you’re unlikely to have heard of on your own:

Known Unknowns #6 - Amazing Underrated Musicians in Endless Supply

• I carefully craft mixtapes of new music for interesting people:

New Music DNA - Pt. 1: Can I Turn Nostalgia Into Bespoke Mixtapes?

• I break down the best new music of the year:

The Best Albums for Old Heads of 2024, Pt. 1

…just for a start.

“Why would I pay for this?”

I don’t know your life. Maybe you’d never pay for a newsletter. That’s fine.

But here are three reasons you might want to pay for this one:

1. You like playlists.

• I offer a metric shit ton of them, and I offer them on a lot of different streaming services: Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Tidal, and Amazon (Changes/updates are in the works). Paid subscribers get more of them, but everyone still gets quite a selection.

2. You like community.

• If you like my recommendations, but you need them more than once a week, and across more genres than I tend to aim for — think of how nice an entire private community of music obsessives would be to bounce new music and playlists off of whenever you want.

3. You like freebies

• I give away vinyl, CDs, and/or concert tickets every month, sometimes more. Paid subscribers are automatically entered to win.

• Founding members also get some free merch (but all paid subscribers get a discount!)

  

4. You like listening parties

• That private community I mentioned? I recently started hosting pre-release album listening parties there. Listen to albums before they’re released, talk to the artists, chat with other music lovers. Think of it like an interactive pop-up video!

• We also host regular New Bands for Old Heads radio hours! Feel like being a DJ? Now’s your chance. Just want to sit back and listen to music with friends? That’s our jam, too.

There’s a lot more, but I’ll leave it there for now. The joy is in the discovery, right?

If you’re not convinced, try it out just for a little bit. I love a beefy trial period.

Paid content should be accessible — so I offer a sliding scale.

My subscriptions are priced fairly (especially as I’ve recently reduced them to account for the volatile economic times we’re living in): $5.99/mo. or $50/year. That works out to about $1.00 - $1.50 per post (plus all the other paid benefits).

But not everybody can afford that. That’s okay. If you need it, the links below will allow you to choose your own price for an annual subscription. As of June 2025, that’s $40, $30, or $20/year.

If your circumstances change, you can always change your plan (in either direction).

Stay in touch. Tell me what else you want.

If you’re a musician and you want to submit music, you can do that too.

I hope you’ll stick around.

xo,

Gabbie