An Open Letter To Substack About Substack Live
I don’t know if tagging people here will alert them to this, but I’m going to try it anyway: Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, & Substack Team, I want to talk to you about something that’s been on my mind awhile and I hope you won’t think I’m attacking anybody or anything like that. This is a constructive criticism, and I can readily admit that there’s probably some stuff I don’t know. But regardless…
For the past year and a half, I’ve been here on Substack engaging with the community, writing about music, premiering new music, performing live, and in general having a really great time. While I thought to some degree I’d aged out of being part of a “scene,” the MusicStack part of this place is just that. It’s small enough that going into a comment section feels like running into people you know at the store or a club. For musicians, as for writers, Substack as a platform has everything a lot of us could hope for in a single place. We can manage our mailing lists, write and send direct communiques to our subscribers via posts or Chats, take people into our world with words as well as videos, and even get paid to do it if people see fit to bless us in that way. I can say that I’ve made more money as a musician here on Substack than I ever have on any other social media platform. Not since MySpace has a platform in the social media space been as musician/creative friendly as Substack is, and I think that with the right marketing, this place could be a hub for creative people of all stripes because there’s so much infrastructure here that creative folks need and the community is so welcoming.
Substack seemed to be nudging the community toward making and sharing videos, and it’s an excellent place for podcasts and talk-based videos, but I went with it thinking it would be an interesting thing to try to use a platform like this for music, being someone for whom video is a reality of what I do. I love the writing part of Substack the most, but being able to make videos and do live shows all on the same platform I’m writing pieces on makes creating for this place exciting. You have options for what you want to do here, it’s not like YouTube or Instagram, where there’s basically only one thing they incentivize and if you don’t do THAT, then you don’t get any traction. So as I’d been doing some live streams on other platforms, I decided to give it a shot here on Substack. I figured there would be a bit of a learning curve as the majority of streaming I’d ever done was as a gamer and the setup there is largely taken care of, but I had audio quality to think about here so I knew it wouldn’t be perfect, but I knew I could perform some high quality shows once I got my own shit together. But as I’ve been slowly realizing over the past year, as a place where we musical types can showcase our abilities and our songs, Substack Live is not up to snuff for said music to be experienced in the best possible way.
When I started streaming here back in April of 2025, my setup was simple. I propped up my phone and just played acoustic, and it worked okay, but the audio options that make for a good podcast don’t really work for music. I found out that the iOS version of the Substack app had a feature called “Music Mode” which would turn off the background noise cancelling that normally happens and allow my guitar to be heard underneath my voice. Sadly, I’m an Android user, but it was also somewhat dismaying that a feature like that wasn’t rolled out to all platforms around the same time. When it finally DID come to Android, guess what? It didn’t (and still doesn’t, as of this writing) actually work. As the clip I’m posting below that I shot last night with my phone as a test will show you, Music Mode on the Android app doesn’t work any differently than normal background noise cancelling mode. So essentially, this feature is locked to the iOS platform. My guitar basically becomes a prop as it’s considered “background noise”:
There’s also no Music Mode option on the desktop app, though I (wrongly) assumed that by using my own microphones and audio setup, that’s what would be heard during the stream. Perhaps it’s a bandwidth issue, sometimes the stream audio is better on some nights than others, but the one constant is the results are wildly inconsistent. This is why I started recording the show audio myself on my rig, downloading the video, and then bookmatching them before reuploading the videos. The issue here is that sometimes the stream stutters even though I have solid internet service and use a wired connection while streaming. So even when I get the audio right near the beginning, sometimes things get off because the video lags and it winds up looking like a movie with dubbed in voices, which is funny I guess, but it takes a lot of editing to get that right too. And as the scope of what I’m doing here changes and grows, using a phone to stream it wouldn’t really work anyway. I want the show to be a show. Informality is good, but I feel it’s time to step things up and part of that is using effects and amps, in part to be able to get the sounds I hear in my head for this in the best possible way for these shows. Amplification can overpower a phone mic in no time, and there’s a reasonable degree of volume needed to make what’s coming through the amp sound good. So desktop is really the best option for me at this point. But it seems that the more seriously I take this aspect of what I do, the more I’m fighting with the platform itself to deliver results that are up to a standard I feel good about.
I wonder about the feasibility of Substack partnering with Streamlabs or OBS to deliver a native streaming solution that works within Substack itself. A lot of streamers are already using these apps and if they were integrated into Substack’s experience, I think more people might be willing to use it even more if they knew the results were going to be good. Imagine there being a “Club Substack” part of the platform where you could hear all kinds of musicians who are here, streaming themselves playing, like yours truly. Jazz greats like Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, and Charlie Peacock. Capital A artists like Juliana Hatfield, Jeff Tweedy, Passion Pit, and Rhett Miller. Hell, even CharliXCX is here and she’d be great on a Substack live stream. The point is, making streaming a great experience here with solid video and audio quality is a win for everyone involved, not just the readership/listenership, but artists, the execs, and the shareholder types. There’s really nobody who gets left behind when this aspect of the site becomes on par with, or just shy of, places like Instagram and YouTube.
I will continue to use Substack because I’ve found a community here and I genuinely enjoy the experience of using the platform. To me it’s like a house with great bones that you can see what it could be and that is THE place that is more creative friendly than any other platform that’s out there. But if Substack is serious about growth and being a place where things happen that people talk about and will want to be a part of, there has to be some infrastructure to support that, and it has to work well for a lot of different use cases. It’s been getting better. Having Substack becoming known as a place where music happens in addition to all the great writing here would be a massive boon not only to creatives, but to the platform itself. Anytime I meet another musician out in the wild and I tell them about everything that’s available here, I can see their interest pique. They know it’s better
Bottom line, I know I’m just some guy screaming into a microphone while playing a guitar on your platform, and not a particularly famous one. But over 200 people are subscribing to me in part for this, and some of them are even giving me money to do it. If I was just dicking around for laughs, I wouldn’t care how it turned out. But it’s more serious than that and I want to continue to do it here on THIS platform. Give me the tools to allow me to make the best possible things I can for the people who are subscribing to me, because that’s what I want, and that’s what they want. And I know that if you’re in a position of power here at Substack, that’s what you want too.
Message them at support. Try everything.
Very well written. I hope they read it and take it seriously.