I Hate Paywalls Too

a.k.a. So why do I charge for this thing?

Last month, I contacted an artist’s PR rep, inquiring if said artist would be interested in being interviewed for the newsletter. This isn’t something I do very often, as I only publish a handful of artist interviews in First Floor each year, but despite the relative exclusivity of these invitations, I’m under no illusion that they’ll be met with a guaranteed “yes.” Another factor: I generally prefer to speak to people when they’re not in the middle of a press campaign, so my chances of being rebuffed are often quite high.

In this case, however, the artist in question—who I’m not going to name—actually was in the middle of a PR cycle. (That’s why I emailed their publicist.) It’s someone whose work I’ve closely followed for many years, and who I’ve also interviewed before, so I was feeling pretty optimistic that they’d be up for a chat.

Here’s the response I got:

“(Name redacted) said they appreciate what you do with the newsletter, but they want to save an interview for something that isn't behind a paywall.”

Was that simply an attempt to politely decline my request? Possibly. No one wants to flat-out say, “This person doesn’t want to be interviewed by you,” and many music industry types have made avoiding conflict, or even just “bad vibes,” into an art of its own. It’s impossible to know for sure, and I likely would have let it go, but that rejection email just so happened to arrive on the same day that I received the following message from a longtime First Floor reader who’d just canceled their paid subscription:

“I hate the Substack interface. I hate this kind of heavy-handed nudging.”

The reader didn’t elaborate further, but after checking my records, I think it’s fair to say that they were upset by the existence of paywalls on First Floor. Over the course of several years, this person had subscribed and unsubscribed to the newsletter multiple times, twice cancelling their paid subscription almost immediately after it was created. The “heavy-handed nudging” they mentioned likely referred to the fact that whenever I publish a piece of long-form content (e.g. an interview, an essay, etc.), it’s first made available in full to paid subscribers only, while non-paying subscribers (i.e. the bulk of the audience) receive only a preview of the article in question, along with a suggestion that they upgrade their subscription if they’d like to continue reading.

Is that heavy-handed? I’m not sure, but it’s definitely a nudge, and the logic behind it is relatively simple: I’m hoping that at least some folks will be intrigued enough by the opening paragraphs of a paywalled piece to pull out their credit card and become paid subscribers. The reader in question had been persuaded to do so several times, but as their message made clear, the resulting feeling wasn’t one of enthusiastic support. They were exasperated and annoyed, and if I’m being honest, I’m guessing that many other non-paying subscribers likely feel similarly. Most of them aren’t going to send me an angry message about it, and there’s something to be said about how a decade-plus of media companies plying readers with seemingly endless free content has cultivated an unearned sense of entitlement, but even I can admit that there’s nothing fun about getting a paywalled piece of content in your inbox every week.

Here’s the thing though: I don’t actually like using those paywalls.

(I did, however, place one right here when I first published this piece, and yes, I do recognize the irony in that. But before anyone gets too huffy about it, know that I took that paywall down—temporarily—after a couple of days, just as I do with every piece of long-form content that I write. Everyone had a chance to read it for free, but now it’s once again for paid subscribers only.)