How and Why we Share Music - by Alex Gallacher

How and Why we Share Music

Credit: Fortepan/Fortepan

The Essentials

KLOF Mag is one of the longest-running independent online music magazines. We’ve been championing intelligent, uncompromising voices in contemporary music since 2004, when we began life as Folk Radio UK — through reviews, interviews, guest articles, news, playlists and mixtapes.

Our website is here: KLOFMag.com. This Substack is our newsletter — a Substack Bestseller that currently ranks in the Top 100 of the Music category — with extra perks for paid subscribers.

The free KLOF Substack delivers an abbreviated weekly digest of what we’ve been covering and writing about and occasional articles.

Paid subscribers get:

“I’ve learned about most of the music I’ve loved over the past couple years from the fine people at this publication.”

Colin Meloy (The Decemberists)

Read on: to learn how and why we share music, and why what we do matters so much to us, independent artists and readers:

How and Why we Share Music

Every so often, I get asked why we don’t just play the music here — drop the tracks straight into the newsletter or onto a page for greater convenience, the way some audio publications do. It’s a fair question, and the answer is more complex than “that’s just how we like it.” It comes down to licensing, which is messier than most people imagine, and it’s why our playlists send you off to your own streaming service while the mixtapes are hosted on Mixcloud, a streaming platform built for radio shows and mixtapes like ours.

That’s the how. There’s a bigger question sitting underneath it all, though: why go to the bother of creating playlists at all, when an algorithm will build you a playlist for nothing? That one isn’t about delivery — it’s about the human hand behind everything we put out on KLOF, and why, after twenty-two years, I still think it’s worth defending.

This is the long version, the page I’ll point newcomers to. Regulars will know some of this already. If you’ve just found us, it should tell you how KLOF helps you discover new music and how our playlists and mixtapes work — starting with the part that trips some up.

It’s all about licences

Every piece of recorded music carries two separate copyrights: the composition (the song itself, the writing) and the sound recording (the master — the actual performance you hear). They’re owned and licensed separately, and that’s where it gets awkward.

In the UK, PRS (Performing Right Society) for Music and PPL (Phonographic Performance Limited) both manage music licensing, but they cover different rights:

Similar bodies exist elsewhere — in the US, ASCAP and BMI mirror PRS on the composition side, while SoundExchange covers digital recordings.

But the bit people often miss is that neither of those bodies can provide an independent publisher like myself, or anyone else on Substack, with a licence package to stream music on demand to you. For that, you have to license the master rights directly from the labels and rights holders, one by one. There’s no off-the-shelf blanket deal you can simply buy to enable you to do this.

We host our mixtapes on Mixcloud because they’ve already done the hard work following long negotiations and multi-million-pound blanket deals with PRS, PPL, ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, SoundExchange and labels worldwide. On Mixcloud, the music is fully licensed. Substack hasn’t negotiated anything like it, so on here the licensing is the creator’s problem, not the platform’s.

So we use two routes

Streaming links — our playlists come with listen links for the services you’re most likely to already have: Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, Qobuz, YouTube. You click through and listen on your own subscription service.

Mixcloud — we can embed a Mixcloud player for our mixtapes on our website but not Substack (yet). Our Play button will either take you to a KLOF website page (KLOFMag.com) or to Mixcloud directly.

Mixcloud run free and paid tiers. Paid is unrestricted: ad-free, offline, the lot. Free comes with a few limits, none of them dreadful:

So that’s how the music reaches you. The harder question is why we put this much into it.

Creation and curation

Putting these together takes real time, the mixtapes especially — they’re recorded a bit like a live DJ set, in real time, then uploaded. A playlist is lighter work, but I’ll still spend the week pulling maybe sixty tracks together and whittling them down to something that hangs together well and makes for a good listen. While I set the running order by considering things like tempo and key, I mostly rely on ear, as I do for our mixtapes.

Human curation v Algorithm (doom-scrolling for the ears)

Spotify’s algorithm is clever, and getting cleverer. It tracks what you play, and it reads the music itself — tempo, rhythm, energy, the rough emotional temperature of a track — to build a picture of the sound you reach for.

The trouble is what it does with that picture. Its job isn’t to widen your taste; its job is to keep you listening, and the safest way to keep you listening is to hand you more of what you already like. So it plays it safe, feeding you close variations on the zone you’re already in.

Over time that loop narrows your world and you hit what's been called ‘algorithmic fatigue’; the recommendations get tighter until everything starts to sound a bit samey: doom-scrolling for the ears.

Concerns raised in a UK Parliamentary inquiry into music streaming — serious enough that the Government commissioned its own research in response — were that recommendation algorithms homogenise taste, reduce new music discovery, and disempower the self-releasing and independent artists who don't have a major label behind them. One submission described platforms skewing everything towards the artists already at the top of the pyramid and the companies with the backing to keep them there. We’ve always championed the independent musician. The discoverability of that music is at the very front of what we do, something that seems to be at the bottom of the agenda for streaming platforms— why? Profit!

Spotify are not alone — On 22 April 2026, Texas Attorney General, Ken Pax­ton, launched an inves­ti­ga­tion into alleged payola schemes on major music stream­ing plat­forms, includ­ing Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music.

Cory Doctorow has a word for the wider pattern: enshittification. Be good to users; then squeeze users to please business customers; then squeeze the business customers to please shareholders. The bottom line is streaming services lose sight of the listener’s needs.

A great example: Spotify run an artist-facing feature called Discovery Mode. Artists and labels accept a royalty cut in return for the algorithm nudging their tracks into more people's recommendations — paying, in effect, to be pushed. No prize for guessing who can afford that.

Fight the algorithm

Everything we put out is curated by a person. Our aim has always been to widen horizons rather than narrow them. We're the antidote to algorithmic fatigue.

The absence of human curation goes beyond Spotify. Stephen McAll of Constant Follower, in response to recent changes at BBC Scotland, highlighted how the playing of new independent artists had dropped dramatically in favour of 1980s and 1990s catalogue music. Linked to this, but further back in time when we were Folk Radio UK, we were one of the stations featured in a 2015 Independent piece on the new wave of online radio. In it, the ICA's then director, Gregor Muir, said curated stations were filling the void left by commercial radio's computer-generated playlists:

What we have seen in mainstream radio is a clearing out of the need to engage — it has become so mechanical.

— Gregor Muir, then director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (in The Independent)

What we’re offering is a service: taking the graft out of finding new music. Johnny Bell, a musician from New Mexico, summed it up beautifully:

As a working dad with two young children, my music discovery time is limited, and I depend on publications like KLOF to filter through the noise and find new sounds worth exploring. Very grateful for all you do for listeners and music makers!

Johnny Bell, artist and musician

I've been doing this for over twenty-two years. Folk Radio UK began as a 24-hour station and blog. The Guardian recommended us in 2011 — "a marvellous companion for a few hours" — and that same above-mentioned Independent feature reported we'd "built a devoted following that includes Tom Robinson and Bob Harris." Tom reached out to us in 2020 after we made a contribution on his show to say:

Folk Radio is a national treasure— my No. 1 go-to source for comprehensive and balanced information on folk music and folk musicians.

Tom Robinson, Musician and BBC 6 Music DJ

In 2024, to reflect our broadening scope — we'd long since left the financially untenable internet radio behind for on-demand playlists and mixtapes — and a more global outlook, we rebranded as KLOF Mag.

I've direct relationships with a lot of artists and small labels, and plenty send me their releases, but I still go digging myself, mostly on Bandcamp. That's the part I'd never hand over. I also don't use submission services and never will.

The artists we cover, across a lot of fields and genres, often end up in the magazine too: a review, an interview, a guest piece, some news. All of it is exposure they can use. There are only so many hours in a day, and reviews eat a lot of them, so the playlists and mixtapes do vital work in getting that music heard.

There are fewer people doing this now than there were ten years ago. Human curation matters more than ever, and that’s what you get when you choose to support us.

Now’s a good time to sign up, or to switch from free to paid — there’s 20% off for 12 months on at the moment, around the price of a coffee a month. In return you get the weekly playlists, exclusive features, recommendations and more.