About Wire
An independent magazine on music, sound, and the cultures they create. Reader-funded since 2019.
Wire is a magazine about music, sound, and the people who arrange both. It began in September 2019 as an email written at a kitchen table in a shared flat in Berlin and sent to 214 subscribers, most of them friends of the writer. Seven years later there is a staff of seven, an archive of several hundred pieces, a print annual, and a radio stream nobody has switched off since 2025.
How Wire started
The first issue was 900 words about a laundrette that ran a club night on Sundays and a CDJ that only played the left channel. Mara Voss wrote it because the reviews she wanted to read were not being commissioned. Nobody covered the room, the PA, the door price, or the fact that half the crowd had turned up for the free soup. Wire kept that bias. We are more interested in how a record was made, and where it ends up being played, than in what number it deserves.
What we cover
Six desks, loosely held. Theo Anand edits reviews from London and writes a good share of them himself. June Okafor reports features from Lagos and can find the invoice trail behind any industry rumour. Silas Reyes files scene reports from Mexico City, and from whichever city had the cheapest flight that month. Petra Lindqvist runs the gear desk in Stockholm and has never recommended a machine she has not lived with. Dario Fontaine writes culture criticism, and the Liner Notes column, from Montreal. Ada Kwon covers news, mixes and live sessions from Seoul. Mara Voss edits all of it from Berlin, usually late. The full masthead lists a contact address for every desk.
How we are funded
Readers pay for Wire. Roughly four fifths of what we earn comes from memberships; the rest is print sales and a small number of sponsors who buy one slot per issue and get no say in anything else. There is no programmatic advertising, no affiliate tracking on the gear pages, and no sponsored post dressed up as a feature. When a company pays us, its name sits in a box that says so.
Most of what we publish is free to read. A few pieces a month are held back for members for a while, and the archive opens up again behind them. If you want to keep it open, that is what membership is for.
What we do not do
We accept review copies, promos and loaner gear, and we send the gear back. We do not accept payment for a review, a placement, or a spot on a list: the Ambient Hundred cannot be bought into, and the labels who have tried are told exactly that. Sponsors never see a piece before it publishes. If a writer has worked with, toured with, or been paid by anyone in a story, the piece says so in the opening paragraphs rather than a footnote. Corrections carry a dated note at the foot of the article.
How to pitch
Send three paragraphs: what the story is, why it has to run now, and why you are the person to write it. Put the desk in the subject line - reviews, features, scenes, gear, culture, live - and send it to pitches@wire.example. We answer everything within two weeks, including the ones we turn down.
We commission from anywhere, we pay on publication, and the rate is the same whether you have written for us before or not. We do not read finished features on spec; we do read finished columns. Pitches from cities where we have never had a correspondent go to the top of the pile.
The short version of all this arrives every Friday in The Waveform.