Year-end letter 2023 for subscribers

Hello, and welcome to the year-end letter at Rhythm Changes. I'm Will Chernoff, the writer and editor at this website, as you no doubt know. If you're reading this, you are a subscriber, so you're one of the people whom I couldn't do this without. Thank you so much for your support of Rhythm Changes.

I made a shortened version of this letter for the public, via the Rhythm Changes Podcast, in audio form:

It's just been unbelievable, this ride this year, and over the whole period of time I've been doing it. This is the first annual version of this that I want to do. I hope I get to update you on how everything's going at Rhythm Changes, how I'm doing, how we're all doing at the end of every year. And we're gonna see what we can talk about, and what I can share with you right now this year, as we head into the end of 2023...

So yeah, I just wanted to make sure I started off by thanking you and letting you know how much it means to me that you're here.

I would say over the last year, Rhythm Changes has reached a point of no return, but I mean that in a good way. As long as I love doing it, as long as I'm willing to put my time into it – which, yes, check, check, I absolutely am – there isn't really anything that can stop Rhythm Changes. It's not going anywhere, it's gonna keep going. I think there's a lot of music blogs and publications out there that are in a precarious position now more than ever. I'm really proud that Rhythm Changes, although it's unique, it's small, it has its quirks, it's not one of those. Rhythm Changes, for the Vancouver jazz community, is not going anywhere.

Now, I don't know when you started following Rhythm Changes, but I started the gig list, which is really at the foundation of everything at the website, in May of 2022. At the time, I had a lot of help from my friend Rory Hislop, who's now gone back to full-time teaching. And so I've been doing the gig list myself for about a year and a bit now, putting it all together. Huge thank you to Rory for helping me get it off the ground.

Numbers

Some numbers for you on the gig list: in 2023 we listed over 2,000 gigs – probably closer to 2,500 actually – and in the typical month there's between 150 and 200 local jazz gigs on this list.

Free weekly email readership

Now another part of Rhythm Changes that you're no doubt familiar with is the free weekly email. I started it, we could say, right around the same time as the gig list. I started it with an initial list of about 100 people, and I'm going to talk to you about that more in just one second here.

Some numbers on the free email members side of Rhythm Changes. You often hear me say, become a member for free at rhythm changes. ca and sign up for the free weekly article. This is the total number of free members we have who have engaged with the email in the past 30 days:

So in any given month, roughly, anyone who opens at least one email is counted in this number. So this is effectively the readership size of Rhythm Changes right now.

Website visitors

And then of course, there's the web visitors. So the best that I can learn with Google Analytics, here is some numbers about the Canadian visitorship on the website, the unique visitors from this country on the website:

Honestly, I don't track how many people visit it from all around the world, because it doesn't really matter. 100% of our subscribers are affiliated with this country, Canada, in some way. The vast majority of people are reading from Metro Vancouver, if not Canada. So really I only check the Canadian viewership, and here's where that is.

The Update subscribers

And then in terms of the paid subscribers, in terms of you and the other people who are supporting Rhythm Changes this way, remember I showed you the free readership? The thing is, it's always been about 5-10% of the free readership who are paying to support. That's been true the entire way right from nothing to something, and I'm sure it will be roughly true for the next while here as well. So this is how many of you there are, the paying subscribers right now:

Now what's cool about all these numbers is if I look back to a year ago now, to the end of the year 2022, I had been doing the gig list for just under a year. Same thing with the free weekly email. I've been offering paid subscription for just under a year. If I look back to then, pretty much everything has doubled between then and now, so that's pretty cool, doubling in a year. And that definitely tells me something about where I want to take Rhythm Changes next year.

Growth potential

And next year, I want to at least double again. And in fact, I almost want to triple, is where I think we could take this. There are some low-hanging fruit in terms of new things I can add to Rhythm Changes, that I'll tell you about at the end of this little chat, that I think will help spread the word to more and more people.

And that's even before I do any paid advertising to promote it or anything, I've never run Facebook or Instagram ads or anything like that to try and expose more people to Rhythm Changes, or get more signups. It's all been what you would call organic, it's kind of a weird word, but it's all been word of mouth. It's all been people who I've connected with and people who have just found what I'm doing in our community.

So there's a lot to be done there in terms of growing it. There's more tools I can do. There's more new stuff I can create, and I'm looking to at least kind of double or triple everything. That would take us into the thousands in terms of the free readership. That would take us into the hundreds in terms of paying subscribers. And it would further take us into the thousands of web visitors.

And when I think about that, you know, my biggest fear is setting a goal that's too low. I'm always happy to set a goal that's very ambitious and possibly too high doesn't make me feel bad. I probably do that, if you ask my spouse, like once a day I set a goal like that. So that comes naturally to me, to set an ambitious goal. And I think this is probably the appropriate range.

I do think Rhythm Changes has a terminal size, if it continues to cover the Vancouver jazz scene, that's probably somewhere around 10,000 free weekly readers. So there's still tons of room there. We are not even close to getting to the terminal size of what Rhythm Changes would be if it always was a hyperlocal thing.

Now, there was one other thing I wanted to highlight about this kind of thing. It has to do with the free readership. It has to do with starting the free weekly article with 100 or so people at the very beginning that I mentioned earlier.

And this is a question that I think is the thing that you can take away, if you have an audience building problem to solve in your creative career. If there's something like that, that you're thinking of, whether it's an artist or you're trying to get people to follow you on your mailing list, follow you on Bandcamp, be your direct fans. If you have a website that you're trying to grow, if you have a business that you're trying to develop an online audience for. This is something that I want you to take away, something you may or may not already have been exposed to. In all likelihood your business is probably much further along than Rhythm Changes is, but we're working on that, right?

And it's about, who were the first 100 people to sign up for Rhythm Changes, period, at all, ever, back in 2020 and 2021 on the way to starting the free weekly email? Versus if I just look at the most recent 100 people to sign up, who are they?

So I broke that down:

How the first 100 people joined

• 52 friends and family – I asked most of them directly via email or text to sign-up
• 30 colleagues – some people who knew of me (or knew me a bit) and took interest at some point. I probably asked half of them directly to sign-up, and the other half did it unsolicited
• 13 people who were new to me – my first interactions with them came from their engagement with Rhythm Changes, even if they had been in the jazz scene with me all along
• 5 subjects of articles that I wrote, or people who pitched their music to me for coverage

How the most recent 100 people signed-up

these are all different people, obviously, but let's run the latest 100 people to sign-up for the free weekly email through the same filter:

• 0 friends and family
• 4 colleagues
• 93 people who are/were new to me – my first interactions with them have been from their engagement with Rhythm Changes. pretty much any person who signs up now, i have never heard of them
• 3 article subjects or people who pitched to me

It's flipped. 80 percent or more are strangers to me and the minority of people are the ones who I end up asking directly, or who end up in direct contact with me on their way to joining.

And that's what I would want you to take away, is if you're in that early first-100-people phase of whatever your thing is, it's so flipped from what it'll end up being the rest of the way. It requires different tactics. We won't get into exactly what those are right now, but it's so different. Those first 100 people, you're going to ask almost all of them, and you have to just ask people. And then later on you don't have to do that anymore.

And maybe that just sounds obvious when you think about it, but it was really laid bare to me at Rhythm Changes when I look at how it's grown over the last year or two.

Now I want to tell you about some new things that I'm trying to introduce, that I'm trying to put together for 2024 at Rhythm Changes. These are all things I have planned for you, the subscribers at first, and at some point if they end up being opened up to the free readership as well, then that'll be awesome. But I want to show it to you first, so that you can check it out, we can talk about how it's doing and improve it.

New features: planned for 2024

Venue Guide

The first thing that I intend to get out to the free readership and to the public as well, but I'm still going to send to you first, is the venue guide.

I actually thought of this a little while ago, when there was another publication who tried to put together an article about like, here's a guide to all the jazz venues in Vancouver. And it really wasn't that good. Like, it was just some random article that was put together, and it had outdated photos and outdated info. It didn't really help very much.

But when I saw this, on one hand I thought, yeah, this isn't very good. We could do better. But I also thought about how the gig list is not very helpful if you're trying to introduce one of your friends who doesn't know Tyrant Studios or Frankie's Jazz Club, etc. to the community. The gig list is really useful for those of us who know the community, but it is not going to help welcome in new people very well.

Because if you think about the format of the gig list, you have start time, name of the venue, just people's names. It doesn't even say what instrument they play. And then a ticket link, like, that doesn't tell you very much if you don't know who those people are, or if you've never been to that venue.

And I really don't think the solution is to clutter up the gig list with a whole bunch more context, because the gig list is functioning super well for its role. But there's something else that needs to be done here, I think.

So I'm gonna try and put together a venue guide, go through each of the main venues that is regularly presenting, and lay out the basic info. I link out to the venue's website and socials, so that you can easily connect with the venue directly, and I just talk about how it works.

So for Frankie's, you know, I can say they do it four nights a week. This is their ticket price range. This is how it works in terms of cover, like it's added onto your bill. They serve food.

You know, Tyrant Studios, I can talk about how you can walk up, you pay cash, or you can buy a ticket in advance. They present these nights of the week. They have a bar, but they're not really a restaurant.

That kind of context: I want to make a home for that. And something called a venue guide is one way where I'm going to try and do that. So that's probably the first new thing at Rhythm Changes that you're going to see next year. I'm going to try and get my draft out of the venue guide.

Will's Picks

Now another thing is definitely a curation on top of the gig list for you, the subscribers. You could think of it like a picks section. And by that I mean I want to shout out Jeni, who had Jeni's pics in Vancouver for a long time. Inactive now, but it was on a blog. picking events from the community and writing about them in a gig list style. I want to do, not precisely that, but take what's coming up on the gig list, maybe a couple of months ahead of time for ticketed shows, and put that in its own monthly feature, so that you can look at some stuff that's happening ahead of time.

The reason why I thought about doing this, is in this month of December, it's amazing how many Frankie's gigs had their reservations fill up before the week came around where I was printing them in the free weekly email. So, you know, this week on December 5th, I put out the free weekly email; and of the Frankie's shows, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were already full of reservations. You know, it's too late for me to try and present it to somebody who might want to go. I know you can get in for the second set, we're just talking about getting a reservation.

And then I looked at the rest of December while I was doing the gig list, and so many of the December shows at Frankie's were full. Like, it's awesome. But there's those, and then there's other ticketed shows that sell out.

I have some long-range views of some of these shows, especially the bigger ones, because they put their tickets on sale ahead of time. I want to look at those personally. I want to follow them, and I want to get the information about them to you before they sell out, so that we could talk about them.

So that's another new thing, a picks section that highlights upcoming bigger shows or ticketed shows that I think might be of interest to you before they sell out. And because of how timely that is and how much it takes more time, that's either going to stay just for you, the subscribers, or it's going to be a while before I get that out to the free readership at Rhythm Changes.

Radio Roundup

Now the third new feature that I want to look towards and tell you about is a radio roundup of local jazz radio shows. So, you know, you have The Infidels Jazz Show on Mixcloud curated by Tim Reinert every week, you have the Condition Blue online radio show hosted by Cory Weeds every other week. You have the super-long-running shows like A Trane by Nou Dadoun and The Jazz Show by Gavin Walker.

I personally feel like I don't listen to those enough, and I bet the same might be true for you, that you don't always catch what they're programming locally. So I want to listen to that more than I have been. I want to pick from what they curate and do a roundup every so often of, "Here are my favourite things that were played on all the local jazz radio shows." And bring them to you in an article format that rounds them up. So that's another new feature that you can look forward to checking out pretty soon, this roundup of what I'm listening to, curated by the local people in our scene who have radio shows.

Wrapping up

So those are the things that are on my mind as I look ahead to 2024. This is the first annual letter thing, that I'm trying to do in audiovisual form as well. And maybe the next one I do, we actually livestream it, and you and I can both be in a virtual space.

I want to thank you for checking out what I'm presenting here. I want to wish you a happy winter break, a holiday season that's warm and filled with people you love. That's what I'm hoping for as well.

Until we talk again next time, have a great one,

-Will