Backstage
Take a glimpse behind the scenes of Negative White.
On Reviews
Giving some perspectives on how we conduct our reviews and how to read the ratings.
The definition of reviews has been muddled lately. Some people mistake paid promotions or product introductions for reviews, which they are definitely not. A review is an independent and critical evaluation of something.
Reviews are subjective by nature, especially in music. Because, unlike a product like a smartphone with many objective features to judge, music ultimately appeals to our emotions—no matter how objective aspects like the artist’s instrumental skills or production quality fare.
With that said, in today’s climate, negative reviews seem to be a dying breed. When tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee took down Fisker’s latest car or the AI-driven products by Rabbit and Humane, there was a certain amount of outrage. People seriously asked: Did his reviews kill these companies?
Honest Opinion
In music, hype drowns out criticism. But can a review destroy an artist’s career? No, not anymore and definitely not by a small blog like Negative White. But—and that’s crucial—it can sting the artist’s feelings. And with a rise in stan culture, critics subject themselves to a considerable amount of harassment as well.
Nevertheless, I will give you my own opinion independently and truthfully and argue it the best I can. You might agree with it or not; both are fine and valid.
However, my reviews are never intended as a personal attack on the artists themselves, even though I fully acknowledge that music is deeply personal to them, too.
The Rating System
My reviews come with a rating of 1 to 5 stars. It’s nowhere near scientific, but take this guide as an explanation and interpretation:
- 1 Star: Avoid at all costs
- 2 Stars: Would not recommend
- 3 Stars: A bit of a mixed bag
- 4 Stars: Worthy of your time
- 5 Stars: A wholehearted recommendation
While I might have advanced access to certain albums and EPs, some need even more time to grow. A review captures the reception at a point in time. Taste evolves; some albums initially loathed might grow, and others fall from grace.
Maybe I will have to revisit some of the works after a while and give you an updated critique.
Positivity & Local Artists
With all that said, there is so much music out there, and I only have a limited amount of time. For January alone, I received more than 15 advanced album promotions that crave attention. So, I suspect I‘d rather spend the time with albums I‘ll rate higher.
Again, I will prioritise reviews of local Swiss artists’ works over international ones. Exploring and recommending local music is part of our responsibility as a Swiss publication.
Music is better when shared
It took me 15 years of Negative White to realise why I keep on writing about music.
Fifteen years ago, Negative White was born. It has been one of the very few things that remained a constant throughout almost half my life because music has, alongside writing, always been a source of inspiration and passion.
Thinking back to Negative White‘s early days and retelling the story feels very distant to today‘s reality of the internet, society, and music‘s place in the world.
I started writing about music sometime in 2008. Concert photographer Cornelius Fischer gave me the opportunity to pen short biographies of the artists he shot to accompany the galleries on his website.
He also organised my first-ever interview in 2009 for an online magazine called «ImScheinwerfer» with The Beauty of Gemina’s Michael Sele. And after his introduction, I wrote a couple of stories for «ARTNOIR», another Swiss webzine.
At the time, I was neck-deep in Zurich’s Goth scene, attending parties and concerts whenever I could. In hindsight, it was a late rebellious phase. And I paid the price because struggling at school and going out don’t pair well. I failed school, 18-years-old, no formal education, unemployed. But with one goal: Becoming a professional journalist.
The last piece of the puzzle was then my then-15-year-old brother Nicola. He got his first DSLR camera—determined to pick up concert photography. And he said to me: «Why don’t we start something on our own instead of working for others?»
Taking inspiration from the Goth saying, «White is just negative black», we came up with the name «Negative White»,—signifying our belonging to the subculture. And with a report from a concert by the Swiss band Spencer, it all started in 2010.
I’m not one for sticky nostalgia drip. In fact, a lot of what we did in the early days was far from anything considered quality. Our website, including the backend, was hand-coded entirely by my brother and his friend, who were IT apprentices at the time. It was a terrible mess.
There were no streaming services, no social media mollochs. We printed flyers to distribute and promote our endeavour. Often, I would still receive physical CDs to review.
And we had no plan, no business model, no goals. We were just happy doing something, and attending concerts for free wasn’t too bad, either.
But we persisted, and the team grew. At some point, Negative White had 30 volunteers contributing stories and photos—not only in Switzerland but in Germany, too. We branched out into lifestyle content and film. We even rented an office space at one point. People working for us went on to become professional photographers, radio hosts, and authors.
I used the platform to experiment and learn while studying journalism. Even when I eventually started in my first newsroom, Negative White continued. But after ten years of constantly motivating a team of volunteers, I felt burnt out. When COVID-19 engulfed the globe in 2020, I buried Negative White in a shallow grave after a decade.
When we started this experiment, we were just caught between the early blogosphere and the rise of social media influencers. The so-called «creator economy» was only distantly on the horizon. And it wasn’t as simple to get things started. Nowadays, the tools to create something like Negative White are as accessible as never before. Still, it feels more challenging than ever as a myriad of apps, content, and, honestly, noise fight for your attention.
And the same is true for musicians. Nowhere is this more obvious than Spotify Wrapped. Tens of thousands of minutes listened, but how active can that be? Often, and I count myself as well, we use music as mere background noise, devoid of deeper appreciation.
Despite the rapid digitisation, my teen experience of music remained viscerally analogue in some capacity. I went over to friends’ places with the sole purpose of listening to music. Today, this explicit intention sounds out of this world.
We live in a reality where more songs are published every day than in the entire year 1989—an incomprehensible amount that devalues music and makes it a ubiquitous commodity. And hell, there is something wrong here: We listen to more music than ever, and the people creating it earn not even pennies on the dollar.
Taking the risk of sounding like a boomer: The accessibility of tools to create and share music comes with a drawback. There’s so much slop and—let’s be real—garbage out there now—a problem only intensified by generative AI. But what people send me in hopes of getting featured is beyond any benevolent interpretation of quality.
Yes, the gatekeepers of old were a flawed and abusive system. But today’s uncontrollable flood of bad and mediocracy can’t be the answer either.
In all those years, I was never sure what so profoundly motivated me to write about music and invest thousands of hours into Negative White. But last autumn, I took a course in «Brand Strategy and Storytelling» and could nail it down to a single moment back in 2005:
My uncle, a deep-digging music nerd, handed me a stack of CDs to fill my iPod. The Who, Bob Dylan, Townes Van Zandt, Led Zeppelin, Sly & The Family Stone, and more. It was then music became something more to me: a way to express to the world who I was, feeling heard and emotionally recognised.
I have realised that what made this moment so significant wasn’t just the music but how it was shared: from human to human. This personal connection made the music so much more impactful and memorable.
Negative White is very much an extension and embodiment of my strive to create a shared experience and nurture people’s passion for music.
Gaining this clear understanding might seem insignificant from the outside. But after 15 years, I now look ahead with clarity, determination, and motivation to keep on writing, recommending, and fighting for my passion.
Setting the Course for 2025
Did Negative White reach its goals this year? And what will be our focus in the months ahead?
The Most-Read Stories in 2024
These posts drew significant interest throughout the year.
Over the past almost twelve months, more than 22’000 people visited Negative White and generated 63’000 page views. However, it’s hard to assess whether these numbers are good or bad without comparison.
From my journalism experience, I know that national media in Switzerland consider a story with 63’000 pageviews per article to be well-performing. In that sense, Negative White is undeniably niche. And that’s okay. Even though music consumption has never been this high, only the most dedicated and passionate are interested in music journalism.
I try to ignore metrics as much as possible. To Negative White, as a newsletter-focused platform, the number of subscribers is far more significant than page views. And as a member-funded publication, the number of paying subscribers is the most crucial.
That said, I review our analytics at the end of the year to gain insights and draw conclusions. (Sidenote: We use Plausible for analytics, an EU-hosted, GDPR-compliant software.) Today, I’ll transparently share which stories drew the most readers.
Nemo broke the code
In February, I received an email about a traffic spike on Negative White. Since I haven’t checked the news yet, I couldn’t understand why a short news from 2023 about Nemo identifying as non-binary would suddenly go through the roof. The answer: news broke that Nemo would compete at the Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland. As Nemo’s career was limited to Switzerland up to that point (he mostly sang in Swiss-German), nothing about them was available in English except for this meagre post by Negative White.
Together with another news post covering their participation’s official announcement, stories about Nemo brought over 14’000 visitors to the side—more than half of all other stories combined.
Janosch Troehler
Artificially generated music
Throughout the year, multiple stories about artificially generated music and fake albums also captured high interest. In January, I reported on the Swiss band Bell Baronets, which had been subjected to an AI scam: The scammer uploaded an AI-generated album to their Spotify profile. That’s only possible because aggregators like DistroKid have lacklustre security measures. Later, I discovered that even more of these scams were affecting Swiss bands. And in April, I wrote a ranty piece about Obscurest Vinyl, an example of a fake artist with AI-generated music taking away attention and money from real human beings.
These three stories intrigued 1200 readers.
Janosch Troehler
Interview, music, and other stories
Aside from the larger AI trend and the interest around Nemo, a couple of other stories reached the top ten. For example, the news about the passing of The Soft Moon’s Luis Vasquez or my retrospective on switching from Spotify to Apple Music.
Equally successful was the interview with Son Mieux’ Camiel Meirresonne, and two premieres also snatched a top spot: Lioba’s Paperthin and Jenobi’s Makeup.
Janosch Troehler
Metric-wise, 2024 has been an exceptional year. The Nemo-infused traffic won’t happen again anytime soon. Yet, the success of these news posts is undeniable and might prompt an easy solution: just publish more news. However, as the only writer for Negative White, I don’t have the capacity to do that reliably. And more importantly, it bores me to death.
I don’t intend to create a news-driven platform but something that takes news and asks: What does it mean? A secondary publication aimed towards analysis, critique, and perspective.
Decide on our editorial focus
Instead of running an annoying survey where you can evaluate our work in the past months, I decided only to ask you a simple and straightforward question:
What would you like to see more in 2025?
Your opinion on this is crucial; it helps me focus on what matters to you. Thank you for voting today.
The Negative White Operating System
Take a peek behind the curtains and learn how Negative White operates, how ideas become stories, and why money is an important fuel.
The biggest threat to journalism is the decline in trust. I believe that transparency is crucial to stop this downward spiral, which helps anyone understand how the processes are set up and decisions are made.
That’s why transparency, in the form of integrity and independence, is a core value that informs how Negative White acts.
Today, we pull back the curtain on our operation and explore Negative White’s operating system, the individual cogs and bolts that make it functional, and the fuel that keeps the engine running.
The Fuel
You can build or buy the fanciest machine—without fuel, it‘s not doing anything. Negative White requires three types of fuel: ideas, time, and money.
Ideas are cheap and vast. They can come at any time, but their quality varies widely. Most ideas are not very good, but occasionally, they are brilliant.
Time, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of ideas: strictly limited and precious yet essential in moving ideas further along the process. Time is scarce because unpaid volunteers run Negative White. I have a full-time job that pays my bills.
Janosch Troehler
Last but not least, money is required to keep the engine well-oiled and functional. We mainly use tools and software that charge fees, especially when user data is involved. If tools are free, you pay with your data.
The Mechanism
Assuming all the necessary fuels are filled in the tank, we can turn on the machine and observe its mechanism.
It starts with a raw idea, often just a tagline like «Interview with XYZ» or an observation like «struggling festivals».
Then, time is of the essence, required for research, talking to industry experts, writing, and producing until the post is ready to be published.
But the machine is not done yet. After hitting publish, more time is needed for distributing the story on different channels, primarily social media.
Naturally, this mechanism is a rather broad approximation of reality. Each idea requires a different input of time (or even money to rent a photo studio, for example).
And the mechanism is a bit different for formats like Weekly5. I‘ve previously described the process for our hand-picked song selection, and it‘s mostly still valid. The primary source for new music remains promotional emails from labels or artists, followed by research by ploughing through Bandcamp, playlists, and other blogs.
The Engine
Finally, it‘s time to examine the engine and its parts more closely. Money is required to keep the parts running, and I make these recurring costs public here.
Main Components
The central processing unit is Notion, a digital workspace offering a variety of features like creating documents, databases, wikis, and more. I write down ideas, document information, gather research findings, and maintain the publishing schedule. Notion ($120/year) is, in some capacity, involved in every step of the process.
The writing, however, I do in a neat app called iA Writer, and no, it has nothing to do with AI. It‘s a distraction-free markdown editor that can actually be used with a one-time purchase.
Then, I deploy Grammarly ($144/year) for editing and proofreading. I mostly ignore their AI features and focus on the proofreading aspect since I‘m not a native English speaker.
After writing, the draft goes to Ghost ($300/year), our publishing platform. While Negative White depended for a long time on WordPress, Ghost focuses on newsletter sending as much as being a neat content management system provided by a non-profit organisation.
Ghost has two additional components necessary to make the whole operation work: Stripe to power our paid subscriptions and Outpost ($96/year) to manage our welcome email flows.
Supporting Components
Besides the main components, the Negative White engine has supporting parts—not as critical but still providing value.
- Soundiiz: Automatic synchronisation of playlists across streaming services. ($48/year)
- Hey: Email tool ($120/year)
- Figma: Creation of social media visuals, mainly for Instagram. (free plan)
- Plausible: GDPR-compliant analytics hosted in the EU. ($97/year)
- Refind: Discovery of relevant and exciting stories.
- Gumroad: Infrastructure for our developing shop. (free)
- Discord: Server for our developing community space. (Join here)
And not to forget: a reliable pen and a notebook for taking notes at concerts.
How does Negative White make money?
Now, it’s worth revisiting the fuels for a second. While story ideas are a question of creativity and time a question of keeping a tight personal schedule, money is the tricky fuel to get.
Negative White primarily earns money via paid subscriptions. The current so-called monthly recurring revenue is $87 or $1044 per year, meaning the subscriptions cover our yearly software fees of $925.
However, there are more operational costs, namely domains and a server. These costs amount to an additional $300 per year. So, a quick calculation reveals that Negative White is just shy of break-even.
If you want to be Negative White’s deciding contributor and help it break even, get your paid subscription here or just donate whatever you can. If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you from the bottom of my heart!
However, relying solely on subscriptions can also be risky. That’s why we are currently looking into diversification: offering products and services in our shop or working with affiliate links.
A Hypothesis to end
I hope this behind-the-scenes report provided some transparency and insight into the Negative White operation system.
I‘d like to round off this post with a little hypothesis because you may wonder now what happens if we actually generate more money than we need.
Negative White will be self-sustaining with around 30 paid subscriptions. I‘m hopeful we can reach this goal in 2024.
Every additional revenue is used to build reserves that may be needed at some point. However, there‘s a threshold where money becomes time, where I could pay contributors or reduce my workload and dedicate a full day‘s focus only to the platform. And this threshold is at 360 paid subscriptions—that‘s still quite a stretch.
