Support Crucial Tracks

A few ways to help support Crucial Tracks and where the money goes

In it’s current state and size, the Crucial Tracks site costs me around $480 per year to run. Not including time, obviously… but even so, that seems like a pretty efficient operating cost if you ask me.

For full transparency here is a breakdown for the previous 12 months, ending mid July 2026 (so basically the first year of life for Crucial Tracks):

Income = $528.29

  • Donations = $190.00
  • Store Sales = $338.29

Expenses = $857.19

  • Hosting & Dev Expenses = $488.00
  • Store Merchandise = $299.19
  • Advertising = $70.00 (Dense Discovery classified ad 7/21/26)

Net Revenue = -$328.90

During that time, we’ve had:

  • just over 400 people join the CT community
  • just under 400 people subscribe to the CT email newsletter
  • the blog get around 2,100 page views a month
  • the app get around 180,000 page views per month (that may be a touch inflated, even though I filter bot traffic as best I can… we actually had over 500k total page views during the last month, so there is a massive amount of bot traffic!)

Beyond what we’ve been doing, there are additional things I’d like to do:

  • New member signups have kind of stalled out, so I’d like to run ads in places like Dense Discovery and on Chorus.fm - places that are more likely to have folks who would be interested in something like Crucial Tracks.
  • More members means scaling up servers, so that would be an extra cost to plan for…
  • Return to doing a year-end record giveaway to get some of my favorite records in the hands of supporters.
  • Provide free merch to folks who participate in interviews.
  • Pay for like-minded services like NeatStats, DNS Kitchen, or OMG.lol – things that add to the community or enhance my ability to manage the site.
  • Do random cool things like free stickers for members…

What I don’t want to do is run ads on Crucial Tracks: no affiliate links, no ads, no sponsored posts… I also don’t what to charge for “pro” features or anything that changes how members use the site. I’d like to keep the site simple and clean.

How to Support Crucial Tracks

We have a couple ways you can currently help support the site:

👨‍🎤 Tell Your Friends!

More members means a more robust and engaging community. Have them join the site, sign up for the newsletter, or subscribe via RSS.

☕️ Buy me a coffee

The easiest way to support Crucial Tracks is to buy me a coffee! Every dollar will go to costs associated with the site.

🧢 Buy some merch!

Visit our merch store for t-shirts, hats, hoodies, vinyl, and more. If there’s something merch related you want, just send me a note… the site I use offers a lot of different options. I aim to please!

Thanks

As always, thank you so much for being a part of this community. Even with our small size, it’s beyond even the wildest expectations I had when I launched back in April 2025. It makes me so happy to think there are other folks out there that love and care about music as much as I do…

I will always do my best to keep this site going, free to use, and free to read the blog posts on the web and through RSS.

–Jason