Some ethical newsletter alternatives
As I’ve stated before, I care a lot about the ethics and principles I try to follow with my creative work. This is a lot easier in the creation process than it is in the marketing process, especially if you are trying to stick to the values I put in place and/or are broke.
I find myself thinking a lot about ethics when it comes time to promote myself. I am technically an extrovert but, as a New Englander, I get viscerally uncomfortable bothering people. I don’t want to be bothered, and I assume nobody else does either. So marketing a music project online — especially in 2025 when 10,000 new songs are published to Spotify daily — is not a thing toward which I gravitate. The way social media has evolved into a certainly does not help.
Fortunately it seems like there are a lot of options out there for those who need to promote themselves but don’t want to get sucked into the echo-and-rage-cocktail chambers of social media. One obvious option is to use social marketing tools like Buffer (disclaimer: yep, that’s my employer) to post promotional content with actually being there. Another is the newsletter.
I think many creators do have newsletters, and I’ve subscribed to a few myself. This right here is technically part of an edition of my newsletter. It’s also posted to my site/blog thingy, and I use a service to collect subscribers who wanted it delivered to their email inboxes.
It still feels gross to me. But it’s somehow still wildly successful in 2025:
- 4.5 billion people have email addresses.
- Over half of “consumers” (gah that word) say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions
- Email seems to have a really high return-on-investment – on average, every dollar spent on email marketing yields $42 back. (This feels wildly skewed toward certain types of businesses, but hey you get the idea.)
- It’s estimated to be 40 times more effective at gaining customers than social media posting.
I need to make my output known to the world (both music and writing like this), and ideally I’d love for some folks to buy it as long as I keep putting it out. Email newsletters are really good for that. Not only should every artist or creator have one – but it should be a primary way to communicate, one of the things you get potential fans & supporters to commit to (as opposed to following you on an algorithmic social feed where they’ll probably miss 70% of what you post).
The good thing is that it’s really easy to start one! There are a hundred options now for starting a newsletter. The not-great thing is that the most popular ones are rife with bad incentives, especially for creators.
Let’s talk about them: Mailchimp and Substack. Let’s put it out there up front: both are free. Both are pretty widely known, because they each spend a lot of money on marketing. There is a reason and method for this, and it’s not quite in the best interest of creators or consumers:
- Mailchimp is owned by Intuit, the same company that makes TurboTax and has lobbied for years to make it nearly impossible to file US tax returns – a basic civic duty — for free. They are a perfect example of a company where you are the product: many of their services are “free”, but cluttered with ads and sketchy, dark patterns to coerce you into upgrading or signing up for financial services that ultimately add risk and complexity to your life. The money they make on these dark patterns & lobbying is used to market their free offerings, like Mailchimp (and Credit Karma I guess? Long live Mint.com), which feed more folks into the cycle of dark patterns, treating them as leads to purchase services thus affording Intuit even more money to spend on lobbying and marketing.
- Substack is a social network masquerading as a newsletter platform for “thoughtful” writing & podcasting. As with any social network, the only way to survive is to relentlessly grow, even if that means giving a platform to Nazis and taking millions in funding from right-wing technocrats to grow & market the platform to hyper-scale because there is no path otherwise to profitability from “democratizing” the bulk sending of emails anytime you want to publish something. Not to mention that once you get a small-ish following of paid subscribers, you lose significantly more of your earnings to their platform fees compared to alternatives.
If I were a creator with a somewhat progressive code of ethics (and many I know seem to be), I would not use either of these platforms. So what to use instead? You’ve got options. First, you’ve got alternatives. A quick rundown:
- Buttondown – in my opinion, the best all-around for small creators and artists. Privately & independently owned by one guy named Justin who cares a lot about transparency, good customer service, and making a really simple and reliable service. It’s also free for your first 100 subscribers, then $90/year should pretty much be all most independent artists need. Buttondown is what I use.
- Ghost – Ghost sort of looks like a Wordpress or Substack alternative without a free option. Their cheapest plan is $108/year, but you get an excellent and reliable blogging & newsletter service with beautiful template options. They are independently run and funded, and your paid subscriber funds their ability to continue maintaining the platform and building features that help you. The incentives run different — unlike Substack, whose recommendation engine is meant to keep creators on the Substack platform, Ghost’s recommendations service helps readers find other writers to subscribe directly to, to help grow those writers’ audience and give them a reason to keep writing on their Ghost-hosted site.
- Beehiiv – A solid option if you’re looking for something very “Substack-like” but with less sketchy social-networkness and better financial incentives. Instead of losing 10% for every paid subscriber, you pay $34/month (minimum) and keep the subscriber revenue. The bigger your audience, the more it’s worth it.
- Kit (fka ConvertKit) – a more conventional email marketing solution that is independently run and has a quite generous free offering. I immediately recommend it over Mailchimp or most other conventional email marketing toolkits, if you want something more like a conventional “mailing list”.
This is all great, but with it all said: I’m also not convinced that everyone having a newsletter is sustainable. If everyone has a newsletter, then everyone’s email inbox becomes even more overrun with emails than they already are. I think blogging is due for a comeback, and RSS may be a more flexible alternative that more creators can and should be relying on. I’m going to explore this more.
