Exhales.
Stares at the screen in disbelief.
Collects thoughts, places fingers on keys.
…
Okay, here goes nothing:
After more than three years of publishing on Substack, and just under 500 posts to show for it, I’ve decided to move this newsletter off the platform.
As of January 2027, every new post I publish will live on a standalone site, still parked at this same domain: bestmusicofalltime.com. Most of the archive will survive and move over there, too, except for a few then-new music posts that no longer fit the ethos of this space.
Needless to say, this is a big decision. Huge. Massive. One I’ve sat with for most of a year before deciding. I still think it’s the right call, and I’ll explain why in the next few words.
First, though, I need to start with the obvious two words: thank you. Some of you have been reading, liking, and restacking since this newsletter had fewer than 50 subscribers. I think it took me over a year to crack 100, so that support meant an awful lot in the early days.
Everyone’s feed is bursting with people vying for your attention, and whatever time you choose to spend with my work … let’s say I don’t take it for granted. Whatever comes next, it comes because you showed up first.
Why leave?
At the risk of going down various technical and philosophical rabbit holes, I’ll keep it simple and start here: this newsletter, and my ambitions for its future, have outgrown what Substack can offer me at this time.
Don’t get me wrong. Substack has improved in several areas since I began using it. Homepage layouts, tags, basic site customization. Credit where it’s due. What hasn’t changed is the wall between what I publish and how visible that work is once you want to extend its reach beyond Substack’s own network.
Three years ago that didn’t bother me much. I was happy giving it a try and seeing what happened. But now I want this writing to spread its wings wherever someone might go looking for it, not just inside one platform’s ecosystem.
I also have higher expectations for this newsletter/website’s UX, including making it a more fluid, centralized content vehicle instead of the text-block-button-text-block-embed capabilities I feel handcuffed to.
I also want my subscriber list to be more than a delivery notification, which I’ll talk about more in a few minutes.
None of this amounts to Substack failing me personally. It got this newsletter from zero to where it is now. I don’t think it can reliably power me to where I want to go next.
What actually changes?
Here’s what’s on the horizon for the new site:
A custom layout built for how music writing and media actually want to display, including relevant streaming links for every song, album, or moment mentioned.
A better taxonomy that connects a review to its ranking and the list that references it, instead of leaving three years of posts isolated from each other.
A robust browsing experience for the archive that doesn’t rely on endless scrolling.
A site built for search visibility and AI readability from the ground up, because I want the work surfacing wherever people are actually looking for music criticism.
If you stay subscribed (and I sincerely hope you do), the emails you receive will change for the better, too. My goal is to make what lands in your inbox after the move read more like a conversation than a notification that something new exists. You’ll get the latter as well, but I don’t want it to stay there in one-dimensional purgatory.
In short, fewer emails, featuring my actual thinking instead of tired “new post is live” messages.
How I got here
I spent most of this past summer building the new site while the Summer of Billboard series ran for you. I didn’t outsource this to an agency or a page builder. I did the design, structure, and SEO myself.
Granted, I’m not a professional developer. I used Claude Code and a few other tools to turn a blank folder into something I’m excited to publish. That’s the whole story. No six-month coding bootcamp is hiding behind it, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
For the record, what that tooling didn’t touch is the writing. Every opinion in every review on this site, past and future, is mine, for better or worse, if we’re being honest. If one of them makes you want to argue with me in the comments, you’re actually arguing with me, not with an LLM. That part of this content ecosystem will never change.
What you need to do
If you choose to stay subscribed, you honestly don't need to do anything.
The one real ask: once the new site goes live, you’ll start seeing emails from a new sender address. Please add it to your contacts when it arrives, or move it out of the dreaded Promotions tab if it lands there. If you skip that step, it may quietly stop showing up in your inbox.
That’s the only thing in this entire post that requires action from you. I will also send everyone more detailed instructions on the technical “how” when the time is right as a reminder.
A note on the upcoming publication schedule
Because of the pending switchover, I will pause new content publication as of November 1, 2026. As of that date, I will stop publishing new Substack posts.
Then I'll take my time with the new launch. I want to thoroughly test everything and make sure all the technical details are functional before the next phase of publications gets rolling. I’ve launched lots of websites as part of my day job, and I know enough to know there will always be small stuff that bugs out. Mistakes will happen. I won’t get it perfect out of the gate.
I hope you’ll be patient.
My goal is to have everything up and running either right before or right after the holidays. I’ll be in touch as I get close, and again once the new site is online. I hope you’ll stick around for what’s on the horizon after that point.
In the meantime, I’ve got a few fun articles in the queue that will see the light of day before the cut-off date. Maybe a studio discography ranking is in your future. Who knows. I couldn’t say.
The archive
Every link that survives the content migration will still work. The URLs will automatically forward to the new pages, and retired posts will route you to the next best place for more reading.
Also, everything stays free. Nothing that’s open today gets locked behind anything post-November 1.
To clarify a point I made earlier, about a hundred older posts aren’t making the move. Most are early pieces that no longer hold up, or housekeeping posts that never needed a permanent home. You may or may not notice, but I’d rather mention it now than have a strange, unexplained gap in my content archive later.
Once again, if you’ve scrolled and read this far down, thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s an absolute pleasure having you as part of this fantastic community. Excited for what’s next!