FSM Online Subscriptions

It’s about to be June, which is the month I use to celebrate FSM’s anniversary—I forget the exact date, but the first newsletter that became FSM is labeled “6–90 Update.”

Since that time—36 years ago—there has been an uninterrupted publication of FSM, either in print or online. This sort of blows my mind. We started out by reporting that Alan Silvestri had returned to score Back to the Future, Part III. It feels like ancient history but we’ve been publishing ever since.

And we want—need—to keep that going. Last year when we rebuilt our website, for legal reasons we needed to start afresh with the subscriptions (you can’t just copy over people’s credit cards into a new system, for good and obvious reasons).

As we sort of expected, not everybody signed up a second time, and we need to grow the subscription rolls in order to pay our writers and editors and continue the mission.

Because it is a mission to me. This is an art form and it should be covered and documented. People should be able to look up the notable scores and composers and find out what went into them, and what their reception was at the time they were created.

I know most people reading this would agree, but we all have so many subscriptions and monthly items on our credit cards and modern life requires us to be selective.

If you haven’t checked out FSM Online in a while, please do! We have altered the paywall so that you get a teaser for each article. We have also put together this free tour of articles and A/V content available to the general public.

Monthly subscriptions are $7.95 and give you access to the entire FSM library since 1990. Here’s more about the subscriptions. I haven’t counted, but it’s probably over 3,000 articles. All of our print issues are scanned (there’s a table of contents online), and the search engine is working for the online issues.

You may find things on the site that look kind of wonky...and that’s because we need to invest more money in the programming. If we were starting from scratch today, we could just use Substack, Patreon or Ghost. However, to keep our 3,000+ articles of legacy content, we need a custom system—and that comes with a cost.

But we are devoted to this! Coming next issue: Mikael Carlsson Celebrates 20 Years of MovieScore Media, Mortal Kombat II (Benjamin Wallfisch), live coverage of the Krakow Film Music Festival, checking in with the Gregson-Williams Brothers, The Vampire Lestat (Daniel Hart), Daredevil (The Newton Bros.) and more TBA.

I have been pushing for more vintage and “classic” content—which takes more effort, and thus funding, to produce.

So consider this blog column the first step in outreach to grow our subscription rolls. We value your feedback, so feel free to post on the comments here, or on the FSM forum, or send me an email: LukasKendallMV@gmail.com.

Thanks and more to come!