Mano Sudaresanfounder of the music blog No bellswill assume the role of editorial content manager for Rakethe publication announced on Tuesday (July 2).
It comes at a difficult time for the media – numerous publications have laid off staff in the past 18 months – and for Rake specifically. In January, parent company Condé Nast wound up Rake in GQ and cut a number of longtime employees, including Pooja Patelwho had served as editor-in-chief since 2018. The reaction was swift: The Washington Post declared “the end of it Rake,” while The guardian called the move “a travesty of music media” and many publications published posthumous eulogies for the venerable venue.
“I understand what the concern was— [people thought] this very important media outlet was leaving.” Will Welchits global editorial director GQ and Rakesays Advertising sign. “It was a misunderstanding. It's not going away, and in a lot of ways, it's getting all this new energy.”
This starts with Sundaresan. In 2021, stuck at home during the pandemic, he decided to start No bells. “Everyone in quarantine had their little hobby,” he says Advertising sign in his first interview since taking the job. Some started baking bread. started a website to host some of his stories – “mostly about these secret internet music scenes” – that weren't picked up by the rest of the publications in a rapidly thinning music media landscape.
“At first I did everything: writing, editing, drawing a little bit,” Sundaresan recalls. “But then I brought in some friends and made it more of a real publication.”
As No bells grew up, “started to get a little bit of authority,” he continues. “We definitely became a voice for the underground rap scene in New York and Milwaukee and these different micro-communities that were starting to pop up.”
Sundaresan, who also previously worked at NPR and freelanced for several websites, spoke with Advertising sign about his plans for Rakehis future in an interview next to Welch. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What did you learn to build? No bells that you hope to apply to Rake?
Nail polish Sundaresan What I bring Rake it's essentially the adaptability and experimentation that comes with trying to create a music blog in the 2020s. It's really hard. It requires not only publishing interesting material, but also seeing where your audience is and nurturing it. We didn't have any kind of legacy to fall back on.
Rake it's interesting because apparently he has that power [built] over two decades now. It also has a line-up of incredibly talented writers, and I think we're in this era where we turn to individual tastemakers for validation when we're curious about new music. I think more attention needs to be paid to creating worlds around these tasters. I kind of did No bellsand that's what I'll try to do Rake.
Are there other new directions or priorities that interest you?
Sundaresan I certainly try to honor his traditions Rake as it is. They've done so much in recent years, especially with widening accessibility, making it more conversational. I want to continue these efforts. Really, my focus is trying to adapt Rake in the modern media age where individual voices take precedence. We can leverage the incredible writers that are on staff and try to build verticals and columns around what they do — serve more niche audiences that way and younger audiences that way.
What does it mean for Rake to be folded under GQ? What is different now compared to a year ago?
Will Welch Rake still continues as Rakeand GQ continues as GQ. I now lead both and am very excited to have Mano working on the Rake project with me. And there are ways that we share the efforts on the back end — operational, logistical things. We had a very nice meeting last week, wherever it was GQ editors share what excites them in music as they look ahead to the rest of the year and beyond Rake editors do the same. There are such discussions, but the Rake The brand continues to stand alone and GQ it also continues autonomously.
This new chapter comes after a round of layoffs that attracted a lot of attention. What led to the layoffs and what do they mean for the future of publishing?
Outsmart I was a reader of it Rake for more than 20 years. I started my career in The Faderanother music magazine that was sort of at its peak at the time Rake she was really thriving. There was always one [dynamic of] looking across the street at what the other was doing. I am honored to have the opportunity to actually work Rake and lead the team. They have done a great job since January. we keep posting at a great clip. There's been a lot going on in music, really exciting, emerging music that the site has covered — as always, going all the way back — and then also a bunch of huge releases.
Mano had such a clear vision of what's really driving the music conversation today, what all of us who are online everyday want to see. This made it clear to me what the future should be. Now we can discuss with a group of staff members and partners how we implement what Mano articulated: what we should keep exactly the same and what we can do in new ways, especially as we think about all the platforms at our disposal.
It's really hard for musicians right now. The way things are set up can be really beneficial for the huge shows, and it can be very difficult for the middle and younger ones. And I think a huge part of it Rake'small role is to support the entire ecosystem, especially young artists and people who are in that difficult middle ground.
Sundaresan One thing it works very well with No bells it's how we've built a community around what we do — writers for sure, but also artists. Rake at one point, before it got bigger, it was very community oriented. I want to try to restore some of that feeling: to get back to literally being on the ground reporting things, creating physical spaces for writers, whether it's live events, readings, panels. I want to build more of a real community around this really strong online ecosystem Rake has already.
Even before the layoffs, I felt that Rake started running fewer reviews and moved them to the home page. HistoricallyThe New York Times focused on reviews, but has moved away from them as well. Do you still think this format has value?
Sundaresan I feel like every few months the album-review-talk is dead. For every conversation around it, you see 18,000 more people posting that Taylor Swift got like a 6.2 or whatever. Album reviews, especially some of these really big releases, are commented on by fans. Some of the highest performing things in the Rake website is still album reviews.
And I think there's still such a need, from a record-historical perspective, for album reviews. You see with platforms like Tiktok and Instagram Reels — they're really important, and I think Rake you really need to leverage them more and create more interesting content around them — but there's only so much you can do. You need a comprehensive write-up on these really important releases, just so that in five or ten years someone can go back and see what happened right now.
Outsmart I would also add that if other stores have moved on from the reviews and Rake is still known as the place that's really committed to this format, then that's a position of strength for us. The basis of the site is news and reviews, and this can and should continue. And then we'll do a bunch of other cool stuff too.
Is there a tension between trying to document some of these smaller scenes and the need to generate traffic? It seems like people have moved away from covering some of the niches because everyone is competing for the same primary clicks.
Outsmart We live in a world where audience matters, traffic matters. At Condé Nast, we have [key performance indicators] for an audience just like any other media brand on Earth. But I think there's a huge opportunity to evolve Rake ecosystem. When this is done effectively, and I think GQ is a good example of this, your business doesn't live and die based on pure raw traffic.
Generally speaking right now in online media, relative to other phases I've been through, this is not a be-all, end-all traffic age. Without taking it to a naive extreme, Mano's instruction is not to chase traffic. It is to create a really high quality website. And then we'll work with the rest of the team to build it Rake ecosystem. Mano referred to facts — I think that's incredibly important. By thinking in new ways about social media platforms, there's so much you can do, so many different ways to not only mean something to your audience, but also bring revenue to the brand that isn't just raw traffic.
Sundaresan You got it. Tetpole reviews always matter. But No bells, to some extent, was about, “Let's build this ecosystem around online music scenes.” We haven't always had the highest readability. That was not our goal. But we were able to sustain ourselves simply by having very loyal readers because they cared about the things we cared about.
I think so Rake has the potential to essentially do that tenfold and have different pockets that appeal to specific audiences, almost like subcultures, spearheaded by genre experts — who, by the way, Rake has already. The resources just haven't been allocated in those directions yet.
After the layoffs, I'm sure you saw there was a wave of pieces basically saying that Rake he was dead. Do you have any answer to these?
Outsmart Only that Rake still continues as Rake. I feel confident in my ability to lead the title and I think we have an incredibly exciting new voice, new thinker – it wasn't until I spoke to Manos that he really crystallized what I thought about the future Rake it must be. He brings this perspective of the moment: This is how people want to talk about music. All the tools are there. we just need to adjust the dials a bit, do some new things. And I think there's an opportunity for Rake to really grow and feel fresher than ever.
