I had to upgrade to much more expensive hosting practically overnight just to keep the site from being shut down. In the months and years that followed, the site kept growing in visibility and readership, and the costs kept rising with it.
Then in March 2020, the Covid pandemic hit. I was working a precarious contractor job, and without community help the site probably would’ve gone offline. DIY punk label owners from Europe and the US stepped in with donations that kept everything afloat, but we still needed a more regular, sustainable way to cover the growing expenses.
That’s when Volo from the band Cold Brats came up with the idea: why not releasing compilation tapes as a DIY counter-alternative to Spotify and all those hardcore playlists that other webzines curate? So in 2021, we committed to something that's much harder than it seems: releasing a new compilation tape every single month, 12 tapes in a year.
This meant a lot of work on top of publishing 3 new articles on the site every week: sending hundreds of emails; curating tracklists; asking bands and labels for exclusive songs; getting artwork done (all artists contributed their artwork for free as they literally had just one week to complete it); sending tracks for level balancing (basic mixing/mastering done for free by Kontingent Records); and preparing everything for the tape pressing plant while hoping they’d finish each run in time so we’d have the tapes ready by the start of every month.
In retrospect, it all worked perfectly. Every tape arrived on schedule. Each edition sold out within days through the Patreon page (though we’d probably choose a different platform today). In total, the series included 191 different hardcore punk bands from all over the world. Tape #10 was a straight edge edition and came with an 80-page zine packed with interviews and critical essays. Several bands contributed tracks that still remain exclusive to these tapes and nowhere else online. I've mailed a copy of each tape to MRR for review but they never published anything (thinking it's a bootleg scam?)
The project covered the site’s expenses for the entire year of 2021 and a large part of 2022.
You can listen to all the tapes now for free:
https://diyconspiracy.bandcamp.com/
To me, this was a perfect example of what collective, unpaid DIY labor can achieve: keeping a project alive not by simply asking for money, but by putting something tangible and having fun along the way. It also connected us with so many people across the global punk community.
Now that I have a more stable and well-paid job, any extra that come in go straight back into DIY Solidarity and supporting cool projects, be it the Antipode book/tour, the DIY punk scenes across places like Indonesia, printing zines, or booking small local shows.
- Mittens XVX
