About

A magazine about the machinery

There is a version of music writing that consists almost entirely of adjectives. Brakkus is the other kind.

We are interested in the machinery: the contracts, the rooms, the routing, the technical decisions and the money flows that stand between a song existing and a song reaching anyone. A record is the output of a long chain of specific choices made by people with specific jobs, and almost none of those choices are visible in the finished thing. Explaining them turns out to be more interesting than reviewing the result.

So we write about what a mastering engineer does with a mix, why a chart position is a formula rather than a fact, what a producer owns after the session, how a festival bill gets assembled, and why a touring band’s profit or loss can hinge on the merchandise table. It is a magazine for people who want to know how the thing works.

Our beats

We organise coverage into four areas, and each has an editor who owns it.

Artists — careers rather than personalities. How a team gets built around a musician, who does what inside it, how artists are found and developed, and the structural reasons those relationships succeed or fracture.

Releases — recorded music and the process that produces it. Studio and production practice, mixing and mastering, the economics of a record, sequencing and rollout, metadata and rights.

Live — the concert business as a business. Touring logistics and costs, festival booking, venue economics, front-of-house and monitor engineering, what a rider is for, why tickets cost what they cost.

Trending — the structural forces reshaping the industry. Streaming mechanics, charts and playlisting, publishing and catalogue ownership, and the technologies changing how music is made and distributed.

How we work

Three commitments define the editorial approach, and they are worth stating because they rule things out.

We explain, we do not gossip. Brakkus carries no paparazzi coverage, no relationship stories, no unverified rumour, no leaks about unreleased material. Not because it would not draw readers, but because it is not the subject. The interesting story is almost always structural.

We describe how things are structured, not what you should sign. A great deal of what we write touches contracts, royalties and rights. We explain how those arrangements work and what the moving parts are. We do not give legal or financial advice, and no article here is a substitute for a lawyer who represents you.

We do not invent detail. Where a piece would need a figure we cannot stand behind, we describe the mechanism instead of estimating. A negotiated percentage is described as negotiated rather than assigned an invented “typical” value. Definitions and technical constants are stated precisely; nothing else is dressed up in false precision.

Corrections

We would rather be corrected than be wrong quietly. When an error is confirmed, the article is amended and the change is noted on the page — we do not edit history silently. Corrections take priority over everything else in the inbox, and the address is on our Contact page.

Disagreement about interpretation is different from a factual error, and we treat it as such. We are happy to have those exchanges; they occasionally become articles.

Who writes here

Brakkus is produced by a small editorial team writing under house bylines, each holding one of the four beats above. Every writer has a page listing their beat and their published work, because a beat read in sequence tells you more than a homepage does.

Keeping the team small is deliberate. This kind of writing needs time per piece, and we would rather publish less and understand it properly.

Advertising, and why the site is free

Brakkus costs nothing to read and is funded by advertising, including Google AdSense and other advertising partners. Those partners see no editorial plans and have no influence over coverage or conclusions — the commercial and editorial sides of this site are kept apart, and anything commercial is labelled clearly and prominently, not tucked into a footer.

We prefer saying that outright to letting readers guess. The alternative to advertising would be a subscription, and we would rather an explainer be readable by whoever needs it.

Getting in touch

Corrections, story ideas about how some part of the industry works, rights and permissions, privacy requests and advertising enquiries all have their own route on the Contact page, along with what to expect in reply and roughly when.