What Substack Gets Right: A Review and a Reading List
I have tried most of the major content platforms over the years. Substack caught my attention for a specific reason: they had actually solved the subscription problem in a way that felt clean and honest. This is what I found after opening The Sound Vault there.
I have tried most of the major content platforms over the years. Ghost, Medium, Beehiiv, and a handful of others that no longer exist. Each time, something was missing. The writing experience was good but the distribution was broken. Or the distribution worked but the community was wrong. Or the whole thing felt like it was optimized for the platform's growth, not mine.
Substack caught my attention for a specific reason. They had actually solved the subscription problem in a way that felt clean and honest. Not a workaround, not a bolt-on. A real infrastructure for building a direct relationship with readers through email.
So I opened The Sound Vault. Not as a serious publishing project. Mostly to see what the platform felt like from the inside, and partly just for myself.
What the Platform Actually Does Well
The CMS is good. Not beautiful, not endlessly customizable, but good. There are limited font choices, minimal layout options, and no theme marketplace. If you come from WordPress or a custom-built site, it will feel constrained.
I do not think that is a problem.
Substack made a deliberate choice to keep the writing environment focused. The product is the newsletter, and the platform protects that by removing most of the distractions that come with full CMS flexibility. You write. You send. The reader gets it in their inbox. That loop is clean and it works.
The subscription infrastructure is what makes the difference. Paid subscriptions, free tiers, gift options, and founding memberships are all built in and work out of the box. No plugins, no payment integrations, no developer needed. For anyone who wants to build a reader-supported publication, this is the highest value thing Substack offers.
The Discovery That Actually Surprised Me
I opened The Sound Vault with zero expectations. I did not cross-promote it. I did not run any kind of launch campaign. I added articles and mostly forgot that other people might find them.
They did anyway.
Without any active engagement on my part, the right readers found the writing. Not a huge audience, not overnight, but the kind of slow organic growth that signals genuine fit between content and reader. People who were looking for something real, not something optimized.
That surprised me. It told me something about who is actually on Substack. There is a meaningful population of readers who are tired of the algorithmic feed, who have left Twitter and Instagram partially or entirely, and who are actively looking for writing worth their attention. They are already on the platform. If your work is good, there is a real chance they find it.
The Sound Vault now has over 1,200 subscribers and more than 1,700 followers. That growth happened without paid promotion, without a viral moment, and without gaming any recommendation system. Just consistent writing finding the right audience over time.
I should be honest about what that path included. At one point, early in the publication's life, I was publicly criticized by some longer-standing platform members for my use of AI in my work. The criticism was pointed. I did not spend much time engaging with it, because the framing missed what I was actually doing.
The One Criticism Worth Making
Substack has a section called Notes.
Notes is short-form, fast-consumption, like-and-restack social content. It looks and behaves like Twitter. It is designed for the same dopamine loop: brief posts, quick reactions, a feed you scroll through and forget.
I find it the least interesting part of the platform and the most algorithmically compromised. Everything that makes the long-form newsletter side of Substack worth using, the depth, the patience, the real relationship between writer and reader, is absent in Notes. It is the part of Substack that is trying to compete with social media rather than replace it.
If you are serious about building a writing practice, you can mostly ignore Notes. The core product does not need it.
Why Substack Works If You Are Willing to Do the Work
Substack is not magic. It will not grow your audience for you. It will not fix thin writing or manufacturing a persona that does not match what you actually think.
What it does is remove friction from the reader relationship. Email is a direct channel. When someone subscribes, they are giving you access to their inbox, which is a different kind of trust than a follow on a social platform. Building that trust slowly, with writing that earns it, is exactly what the platform is designed to support.
The best version of an online writing practice is still your own domain, your own infrastructure, and an audience that follows you regardless of which platform you happen to be publishing on. But building toward that takes time, and Substack is a legitimate place to build the initial layer of trust and readership while you get there.
If your goal is to reach the right people rather than the most people, and if your writing can hold the attention of a reader who chose to be there, Substack is worth your time.
A Reading List Worth Your Attention
One of the best signals that a platform has the right culture is the quality of the writers it attracts. These are the publications worth following.
Ted Gioia / The Honest Broker writes about music, culture, and the state of art in the age of algorithms. Gioia is one of the clearest thinkers writing about what technology is doing to creative culture. His 2024 essay on dopamine culture and his 2025 follow-up on the flattening of the internet are essential reading for anyone thinking seriously about creativity right now.
Bandcamp Notes is the official newsletter of Bandcamp, written by the Bandcamp Daily editorial team. Launched in May 2025, it focuses on music discovery and directly connecting fans with independent artists. No algorithmic curation, no brand partnerships. Just editorial picks from one of the few platforms still structurally aligned with artists over intermediaries.
Rick Rubin / The Creative Act: Thoughtforms and Innerworks -- Rick Rubin needs little introduction. Co-founder of Def Jam, producer behind records from Johnny Cash to Kendrick Lamar, and author of The Creative Act. His Substack is a weekly practice-oriented extension of that book: short, contemplative, and focused on what it means to pay attention as an artist. Over 220,000 subscribers.
deepculture publishes a weekly digest of ten interesting things, every Tuesday. The format is deceptively simple but the curation is sharp across music, culture, technology, and ideas. Over 25,000 subscribers and one of the better examples of what a newsletter looks like when it respects the reader's time.
Flow State delivers two hours of instrumental music recommended for focused work, every weekday morning. The writing is brief but the curation is serious: no vocals, no factory-farmed focus playlists, no algorithm. Started in 2018 on Substack before most people knew what Substack was, and has grown to over 43,000 subscribers entirely through word of mouth.
Yung Pueblo / Elevate is the pen name of Diego Perez, an Ecuadorian-American writer whose work centers on meditation, self-healing, and personal transformation. More than 232,000 subscribers on Substack. Not strictly about music, but the underlying sensibility, patience, introspection, and the relationship between inner practice and outward expression, overlaps significantly with anyone who takes creative work seriously.
Dan Koe / future/proof covers independent work, writing, and staying relevant in the age of AI. The newsletter sits at the intersection of philosophy and practical creative strategy, and his recent writing on what happens when AI commoditizes thinking is some of the clearest-headed content on the subject right now. Over 288,000 subscribers, ranked number one in Philosophy on Substack.
The Music Week is a weekly music publication covering album reviews, recommendations, industry discussions, and deep dives. Independent, opinionated, and written for people who actually care about what they are listening to rather than what the algorithm served them this week.
zensounds / Stephan Kunze is written by a German music journalist and former Global Editorial Lead at Spotify and former editor-in-chief of Juice magazine. zensounds covers ambient, experimental, and instrumental music with a focus on deep listening rather than background productivity content. Kunze brings more than 20 years of music industry experience to a newsletter that is about as far from algorithmic curation as it gets.
Related reading:
- The Rise of Dopamine Culture: How Algorithms Rewired Everything We Create, Consume, and Feel -- Ted Gioia's framework for understanding what platforms have done to culture, and why the counterculture is already forming.
- Subvert.fm and the Artist-Owned Internet -- on building direct relationships with audiences outside the algorithmic systems, and what that actually requires.
- Making Music for an Algorithm, Not an Audience -- the specific mechanics of how the platforms have reshaped music creation, and what it costs the work.
