I Started a Newsletter — Subscribers Get Early Access to My DJ Mixes

I’ve finally launched the newsletter (email magazine) I’d been thinking about for a while.

The idea came from wanting a quieter, more direct space to connect with people who read this blog — somewhere different from the constant scroll of social media timelines.

A Thank-You Gift for Subscribers

If you’re going to take the time to sign up, I wanted to offer something in return. So everyone who subscribes gets two exclusive mix recordings right away — one is a set I played on an Italian radio show, and the other is a recent personal favorite.

The signup form is at the bottom of every post on this blog. All you need is an email address.

My Sending Policy

I don’t plan to send emails often. I’ll only reach out when a new DJ mix is ready or when there’s significant news like a release. No event or party announcements. It won’t be more than a few emails a month — probably less — so feel free to sign up without worry.

Why I Chose Kit

I compared a few email services before settling on Kit (formerly ConvertKit). It’s built with creators in mind, and I liked how clean and straightforward it is to use. The free plan supports up to 10,000 subscribers, so it’ll work fine for this blog for the foreseeable future.

I also set up the automatic delivery of the mix recordings using Kit’s Sequences feature — so as soon as you sign up, the email with the links goes out automatically.

Turning DJ Mixes into Videos

When a new mix is ready, I also upload it to YouTube as a video. It’s nothing fancy — just a single flyer image with the audio laid over it. That turned out to be enough, so I built a local workflow using ffmpeg to generate the video automatically.

On Mac, I installed it via Homebrew:

brew install ffmpeg

Here’s the command I use. You just pass in the flyer image (cover.jpg) and the mix recording (mix.mp3), and it outputs a YouTube-ready video file (output.mp4):

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i mix.mp3 \
  -vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2:color=black" \
  -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 18 \
  -af "loudnorm=I=-14:TP=-1:LRA=11" \
  -shortest \
  output.mp4

I’m using 720p (1280×720) resolution. Since it’s a static image, that’s more than sufficient — and it keeps the file size manageable.

The loudness target is -14 LUFS, which matches YouTube’s automatic normalization level. Since I record mixes slightly quiet to avoid clipping, this normalization step is essential.

For now I’m uploading videos to YouTube manually, but I’m looking into automating that part with the API down the line.

The Workflow

When a new mix is done, I first send subscribers an unlisted YouTube link. After a while, I’ll switch it to public. The idea is that subscribers always get it a little earlier than everyone else.

Sign up below — no pressure, no spam.