Hey what’s up!!! Thank you for subscribing to Train Songz, whether you did do earlier today or on January 10 when we launched the subscription.

Our “thank you for subscribing” email used to be automated, and I’m just realizing that broke sometime around mid-October. So I’d like to give a special shoutout and thank you to new subscribers since then!!! What’s up!!!

Reminder: Subscribers can gift a friend a copy of our latest issue, the Royal Masat interview. Prank ‘em with some niche, independent print media in their mailbox!

Zine delivery

I hope your zine gets to you this week, if you grabbed one by December 19th! If you ordered after that date, you’ll probably mail out this week because of our holiday shipping delay.

As you wait for it, listen to this Royal-centric playlist from Love & Sound and peruse all of our other playlists here. Note that if you’re clicking on a nugs playlist link, the only way to access it is via your mobile device with nugs installed. Weird quick. Not good for laptops.

Wanna be close friends?

Look at my Instagram story if you’re reading this within 24 hours of this email’s send time. If you don’t see a “close friends” story with a green circle, respond to this email with your username and I’ll add you to Train Songz’s close fiends list. Asking for this was part of the automated welcome email that stopped sending, so I figured this is a good time to remind everyone.

Subscription reminder

Your subscription will renew on the date that you signed on in 2025 for the same price you paid last year — $33, $44, $55, $66, $77, $88, and $99.

• If you’d like to not renew next year, you can do so here or by emailing me back and letting me know.

As a little preview of things to come, next year we’ll be recommending $55 per subscriber, while also offering $33 and $77 to balance things out on each end.

• We don’t have it set up yet to change to $33, $55, or $77. If you’d like to do that, you can either stay put and wait about a week or email me back and let me know.

This year we were at about 60% for our recommended price of $44 with 25% at $33 and 15% at $55 or above. Our financial report email next week will get deeper into the reasoning on why we’re asking for $11 more this year.

Note: If you log in to your account at zine.trainsongz.net right now, there’s a glitch where it says everyone doesn’t have an active subscription. If you see that and think you’re actually active, don’t worry about it. You can always ask me if you have any questions.

Call for artists

Know someone who would be great as a zine contributor? Send me their portfolio. We’re always looking.

Call for stockists

Know a record store, café, or other print-media-sympathizing small business who might stock the zine for free? Let me know. We’re always looking.

Fun odds & ends for musicians

If you play bluegrass music, I think these two resources are awesome. These are not #ads. Just a few things I’d been saving to put in our next subscriber email.

1. Strum Machine

This is a free 30-day trial to Strum Machine, a tool that makes customizable backing tracks from real instruments. Brakeman and Promontory Paul swear by it, so we reached out to its founder to see if we could get any kind of deal for our subscribers. They were kind enough to oblige and offer this 30-day free trial, after which it costs $5 per month.

2. bluegrassjamsnearme.com

Truth in advertising! Exactly what it says to be: an aggregator of bluegrass jams near you. Liz from Bluegrass Brooklyn emailed out this tool to her mailing list last week, and I had to share it here.

Looking ahead to 2026

Our priority for next year is making the best four issues of print media possible. We are looking into pushing the limits of paper quality, illustration, writing, and even page count. Every detail counts, especially in such a little magazine. Each issue is a fun new breakthrough for our team in some way, and we’ll be pushing hard to sustain that feeling in 2026. Thank you for this opportunity, we love to do it and couldn’t do it without your support. Each issue exists because of you.

You’ll see in the financial report, like last year, I didn’t pay myself this year. Promontory Paul didn’t take a cut, either. This is not because we’re altruistic heroes, but because we started this thing and feel like it’s in the best interest of the zine to reinvest what we make into issues and, more recently, events and marketing. We also know it’s the right thing to do to pay our contributors fairly along the way. No free help! Clout doesn’t pay the rent.

Going into next year, I promised myself I’d treat the zine “like a job.” That means is finding time for it during the day, rather than exclusively nights and weekends as it typically has been. You don’t owe me a damn thing more than you’re already giving me with your subscription, but I want to let you know about my intentions this year. This change is possible because I’m freelancing professionally now, meaning I can augment my hours up or down. I feel some good momentum with this thing, and I want to see what Train Songz’s role in the music world might be. Maybe it’s permanent passion project—maybe it’s something more. We’ll see.

Grateful to even have the opportunity to think about one day in the future this could support me in any kind of way. One zine at a time.

–The Conductor