WELCOME TO SMOKESTACK

Smokestack is a monthly-ish digital dispatch from The Conductor about all things Train Songz.

ANONYMOUS PRINT SUBSCRIBER TESTIMONIAL

"I find a lot of comfort knowing other people out there are geeking out over this stuff as much as me. Thanks, Conductor!"

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ABOUT TRAIN SONGZ

We make a quarterly zine you can subscribe to here, buy a single copy here, or apply for a free issue here. Subscribers can also get back issues; just email me.

We also take merchandise preorders four times a year, and our third store of the year is open now through Halloween.

Want to sponsor the zine? We’re always looking for new partners to advertise in the next issue. Get in touch!

At the time of this writing, we have 1,577 annual subscribers. Thanks to the generosity of our paying readers, we have mailed out over 600 free issues and handed out over 4,000 copies at shows so far this year.

A MESSAGE FROM GRASSFED BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL

Use code TRAINFED to get $10 off your ticket to our friends at Grassfed Bluegrass Festival in Nags Head, NC, on November 14! The folks behind Grassfed are good people on their second year of this fest, and they’ve booked a very impressive lineup: Shadowgrass, East Nash Grass, Broken Compass, and more! They’ve been helping us out all year handing out zines at various shows and helping us spread the good word of niche print media, and in return we’re happy to help promote their festival.

IN THIS SMOKESTACK…

1. SOME TUNES TO WHICH TO LISTEN

2. 75% OF THE YEAR FINANCIAL UPDATE

3. MIDYEAR FEEDBACK & VIBES

SOME TUNES TO WHICH TO LISTEN

Each Smokestack comes with one link meant for exceptionally focused listening and auditory exploration and enjoyment. Last issue, we shared a playlist by Josiah Nelson, Friend of the Train and fiddler for Mountain Grass Unit. This issue, I’d like to point you towards The Cody Sisters as featured in Test House Sessions, recorded live at the Jalopy Theater in Brooklyn, New York. Test House Sessions is a project from Ben Bingham’s Pancake Test House. If Ben’s name rings oddly familiar in the back of your cranium, that’s because he’s a zine artist! He drew that “Appalachian Smokestation” sticker from the most recent issue.

The Cody Sisters live in Brooklyn, but I know a lot of y’all live in Asheville and they’re playing the Grey Eagle on the 23rd of October, as well as a handful of other shows around North Carolina and Virginia before coming back through the Northeast in mid-November. I recommend going to see them, if you’re able!

75% OF THE YEAR FINANCIAL UPDATE

Money. You’ve heard of it. We spend quite a lot of it over the course of the year, and I enjoy sharing exactly how and why. The game-within-a-game of Train Songz has been me learning to run a business, even if I didn’t set this out to be a business. I have learned to manage budgets, people, and my own time (sorta) over the last ~two and a half years and building it transparently in front of you all has been a big part of that. (This experience has also given me the confidence to know I can run a thing by myself and a big part of the reason I freelance for work now, rather than have one single full-time job.)

Train Songz started as a “ships free, pay what you want” eight-page zine written, printed, packed, and mailed from my apartment with the help of a friend named Promontory Paul back in January 2024. Since the beginning we’ve been a little too honest with our finances, and as the zine has shifted shapes since then into what it is today funded by paying subscribers and sponsors, we’ve tried to stay true to that ethos. As we’ve grown, the biggest change we’ve made is going from making the zine alone with just the two of us to bringing in 15+ artists per issue who we pay by commission to do illustrations, as well as our art director Liza and copyeditor/writer Brakeman who help us out in more serious ways and are paid for their contributions.

As of now, Promontory Paul and I are not considering our time and labor as part of the total costs of running Train Songz, which is a fancy way of saying we’re not paying ourselves. Don’t feel bad for us or think us to be altruistic heroes sacrificing ourselves for the good of the vibe; the zine has sent us to Telluride Bluegrass Festival and given our lives just the right amount of spice on the side of our meat-and-bones identities that occupy our daily lives. This project is our locomotive baby and we feel in the steam engines of our souls that’s the right move as we build Train Songz, Train Songz, and train_songz into what it’s meant to be, a space for creativity and community in a world that is too often a cruel digital abyss, with AI slop shoved down our throats like some kind of Silicon Valley foie gras nobody ordered.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

So far this year, our zine and core operations are comfortably profitable and we can fund the last issue of the year (~$13K) no problem. We have spent $52,530.75 so far this year against $66,931 in income. 98% of that income is from subscribers and 2% is from single-issue sales, which is a pretty dramatic decrease from last year. We seem to be settling into folks who either subscribe or apply for a free issue, which is fine by me. I have some ideas to boost single-issue sales; I don’t think it’s too obvious on our website, for example, how to buy a single copy. But at the end of the day it’s all good, it’s a compliment that so many of you want to subscribe.

Anyway, that means we have $14,399.99 in the zine-bank with one more issue to go. We budget about $13K per issue, with about 60% going to hard costs like paper, printing, postage, etc. and the other 40% going to artists and contributors. We have more money coming in this year, too, from renewals and new subscribers — which is a tbd amount depending on who chooses to subscribe and renew. Nearly 9 of 10 (88% for the mathematicians out there) readers have renewed year-over-year and we add about 1 or 2 subscribers a day, so I'd make a healthy estimate that we'll have about 140 renewals and 125 new subscribers by the end of the year, bringing in about $12K in extra funds, which puts us in a great place to afford anything we need to make the last issue of the year as good as we can and either do some extra cool stuff or save for the future, plus some essentials like pay our accountant. Yes, we need an accountant and yes, we met through the zine. It’s a family business!

TRAIN SONGZ’S BLUEGRA$$ BREAKDOWN

Here’s how our zine spend breaks down, so far. You’ll see we spend about $12–14K per issue and our biggest expense is paying our contributors and artists:

1. Making and mailing the zine: $41,044.08

   • Zine contributor payments: $16,142.45

   • Printing: $9,744.24

   • Postage: $9,125.51

   • Stickers: $2,996.00

   • Envelopes: $1,376.77

   • Paper: $1,659.11

2. Running the business: $11,486.67

   • Business software and subscriptions: $4,096.25

   • Payment processing (Stripe fees): $3,868.11

   • Web development: $2,637.50

   • Supplies: $811.89

   • Research / books: $72.92

Once again, we cannot thank you all enough for affording us the privilege to run a print magazine. While I believe in the importance of offline, non-algorithmic media that isn’t engineered to hack your attention, print is much more expensive and inconvenient than digital media. This would not be possible without you, and I am eternally grateful that you trust us to turn your money into a booklet that archives a specific moment in time of the music we all love. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

EVERYTHING ELSE

We also make money from sponsors, and we try (sometimes unsuccessfully) to make money from merchandise. So far this year we've booked $9,450 in sponsorships, a little over $3K per issue, and with one more issue to go we should land around $12K. If you’re reading this and know a small business who is a vibrational fit to do what we do and might be keen to sponsor, we typically charge $250.

On merchandise, we've made $15,376 in revenue against $17,023 in costs. Yes, that’s a loss, mostly because I undercharged for shipping and we paid artists more for designs (which I'm totally fine with!) and I don’t price things high enough to account for taxes, fees, etc. I'm never trying to make a big profit on merch, but since we only sell to subscribers, it'd be great if we weren't subsidizing it. Those numbers already include preorders for the winter drop, which stays open through Halloween, but we haven't paid to produce that run yet, so we'll dip a little further before our last store of the year. I'm working on pricing future drops more accurately.

Sponsor and merch money goes into our "everything else" bucket. That covers free issues handed out at shows, zine-related travel, and random research and development to do cool stuff. It's how we got to Telluride on a press pass, and how we got the zine team to Nashville in August for Mountain Grass Unit's album release show, where we handed our new issue to just about everyone there who wanted one. That was one of my favorite moments since starting the mag. We travel as frugally as we can, and Brakeman and I are heading to IBMA in Chattanooga tomorrow.

Right now this 'bucket' is a bit underwater for the year, partly because Telluride was a new expense and we're still learning how much we 'should' be traveling. (I think the answer is Telluride, IBMA, and not much else.) With one more merch run and one more issue's worth of sponsors still to come, I think we'll be alright, even if we set aside some of 2027's sponsor and merch money to pay ourselves back. That matters to me, because I don't want to get in the habit of subscriber money going to zine-related travel or trying to grow the zine with wacky ideas or special projects. I'd rather sponsors and merch fund that, so you know your money goes into what's being mailed to you.

Ultimately, it’s important for me to stay focused; I don’t want Train Songz to be too much more than a great quarterly zine and a fun Instagram account. I have tossed around the idea of a radio station or other such “content,” but those things don’t feel like it's on the road to what we want to be right now. Part of that focus is making sure every dollar we spend either makes the zine better, like going to Telluride and IBMA, or helps it grow, like handing a zine to everyone at an MGU show, which we think really paid off and is part of why we've gotten so many more new subscribers in the second half of the year.

MIDYEAR VIBES & FEEDBACK

This has been a hard year for me, though I hope you haven’t felt it in zine quality because we have so many talented folks who are not me working on churning out these issues. I’m all good, I just got caught up in a gnarly social media job where I had to be online paying attention sort of every day all the time. It was a short-term thing, but doing something like that will really zap your positive vibrations from any “side projects that got way out of hand” such as Train Songz. The coolest stat is we’ve gotten 240 of this year's 440 new subscribers joining in July or later, and that job ended in June, so that’s a good feeling that putting more time into the zine and our social media is helping us find new readers.

We are right now planning our last issue of the year, and I’m determined to make it our best. I really loved our first issue this year, Train of Fools, with Sam Grisman Project, the Asheville Mountain Boys, and Maddie Denton + Brenna MacMillan. I thought it was thoughtful and varied; a breath of fresh air after doing the oops-all-Royal issue to end 2025. I wish we could’ve given each of the three interviews in Train of Fools more space — there’s really never enough space in this thang !!! — but it’s fun to squeeze as much as we could in there and challenge ourselves to be simultaneously tight and thorough. Sam Grisman Project especially has put out one of my favorite records of the year in their self-titled debut studio album, if you’re still reading down here remind yourself to spin that one soon.

It was also a joy to interview Jarrod Walker (and Christopher Henry!) and Mountain Grass Unit in more long-form, focused ways at big moments in each of their lives and careers, with Jarrod dropping his debut record Nighthawk and MGU dropping theirs, Appalachian Smoke. I want these whole-issue-features to be the exception, not the rule, so don’t expect them all the time going forward — but I felt it was a unique moment and I chose to do “cover issues” back to back.

So 12 is in the oven right now. We’ve done a few interviews, and we’re doing some personal writing. We will figure out the word count per feature before we write, and we’ll also figure out most of the art before we write. Our art director Liza works 1:1 with all of our amazing artists to guide their creations, and Promontory Paul + Brakeman + I split up the writing as we see fit. We’re trying to get all of the writing and art done by the first week of November, and then we’ll flail around a little bit getting everything finalized and hopefully in the hands of the United States Postal Service before Thanksgiving.

C🚂U🚆L8R

I’ll end this on a random note but thinking about it because someone emailed to ask the other day. Stamps. We don’t hand-stamp our first mailings of the zine to subscribers and early orders anymore because we use a bulk mailing service, who pre-sorts the mail for the USPS and actually gives us pretty heavily discounted postage. It also comes with tracking per envelope, which is very handy in the case of “where’s my zine?!” questions. Alas, we can’t have our convenient cake and eat it too, and the consequence of this is they print on the postage rather than use stamps. So we’re saving money while losing a little bit of that handmade aesthetic, but we’ve intentionally kept hand-numbering the first 2000 copies of each issue to at least keep that element alive.

Thank you for reading, please hit me back with any questions or thoughts and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Off to IBMA!

–The Conductor