An announcement of this year&#8217;s pledge week. To sign up to the Patreon, visit <a href="http://patreon.com/andrewhickey">http://patreon.com/andrewhickey</a>
Transcript
Welcome to Pledge Week 2024.
For those who don&#8217;t know &#8212; perhaps you&#8217;ve only recently started listening to the podcast &#8212; this podcast is entirely funded by people backing me on Patreon, the crowdfunding site, and so occasionally I&#8217;ll do a pledge week, where I remind people about this and encourage people to sign up.
The main benefit you get for signing up to the Patreon, other than the knowledge that you&#8217;re supporting an independent creator, is bonus episodes. There&#8217;s one of these with every main episode, and sometimes random other ones as well. They&#8217;re shorter episodes than the main episodes &#8212; I say at the end of each main episode that they&#8217;re ten minutes, and that&#8217;s how they started out, but often in more recent years they&#8217;ve been twenty-five minutes or more, sometimes as long as an hour, as they&#8217;ve grown in the same way the main episodes have grown.
These bonus episodes are about artists who for whatever reason don&#8217;t fit into the main narrative I&#8217;m telling. Sometimes they&#8217;re a massively important artist, but one who never interacted much with the rest of the music world and made their own path, and so they don&#8217;t feed into the larger story. Sometimes they&#8217;re an obscure artist who never had much success at the time but gained a cult following after their death. Sometimes they&#8217;re just a personal favourite of mine who I can&#8217;t really justify devoting a main episode to. Sometimes they&#8217;re someone who made great music but had a boring story that wouldn&#8217;t be worth spending a long time over, but I can tell the highlights, and sometimes they&#8217;re someone who made terrible music but had a fascinating story. And sometimes they&#8217;re people who I would cover in a main episode but who there&#8217;s simply not enough information about to tell the story in any detail.
There are lots of reasons for artists being covered in the Patreon but some of the episodes I&#8217;ve done for that have been among my favourites.
Anyway, anyone who signs up to the Patreon as a backer for $1 or more gets access to every single bonus episode I&#8217;ve done, and continues to get access to new ones as long as they&#8217;re a backer.
Now I have to emphasise this time round that that is &#8220;for $1 or more&#8221;. For some reason known only to themselves, the people at Patreon recently decided it would be a good idea for their crowdfunding site which exists as a way for people to pay artists they want to support, if they put in a compulsory free tier on every account where you pay nothing, and to make that the default that people see. So if you sign up, you see &#8220;Sign up for free!&#8221; If you sign up for free you won&#8217;t get anything.
But if you sign up for $1 a month, you&#8217;ll get somewhere in the region of two hundred bonus episodes &#8212; and if you want you can cancel right after you download them all, and you&#8217;ll have only paid one dollar. I won&#8217;t be annoyed at that &#8212; that&#8217;s the deal here. I know times are tough and sometimes a dollar is a lot. If you sign up for higher tiers, you get copies of most of my old books as ebooks, and new print books when they come out (though it&#8217;s been quite a while since a new book came out &#8212; the person who was proofing and indexing the next book based on the podcast got sick with long covid and I&#8217;ve been having to do that myself while doing my other work, but that should be out sooner rather than later, and you&#8217;ll get access to all the past ebooks straight away). People on all tiers also get occasional blog posts from me &#8212; gig reviews, occasional updates about my work process, and so on. But the main extra you get is the bonus podcasts.
So for the next five days, tomorrow through Saturday, I&#8217;m going to post five of those bonus podcasts to the main feed, to give you a free taster of what these bonus episodes are like. If you like what you hear, you can sign up at patreon.com/andrewhickey &#8212; there&#8217;ll be a link on the blog post associated with this, as there is with all of the episodes.
And one more thing I need to stress &#8212; *only sign up for the Patreon if you can afford it*. My listeners are currently very generous, and I am making a good income from this podcast now. I have to do these pledge weeks to keep the numbers up and make sure new listeners know what&#8217;s on offer, but I don&#8217;t want anyone to feel like they are under any obligation to pay me a penny. And times are tight enough that many people genuinely can&#8217;t afford even a dollar a month.
But if, after you&#8217;ve paid your living expenses, helped out any needy friends, given to proper charities, put away something in savings, and all the other important uses for money, you do have a dollar a month or more left over, and you like the sound of the bonus episodes that will hit the feed this week, why not sign up to the Patreon? There&#8217;s a lot more where they came from.

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