The 2026 No Ripcord Annual Report

On 10 October 2025, after a brief pause—and with little fanfare—we relaunched No Ripcord as a modern, supporter-funded website.

We made three key decisions while redesigning the website:

1. No Ripcord reviews will always be free to read. There must be no paywall on reviews.
2. Absolutely no advertising or sponsored content. Our opinions are 100% our own.
3. Paying supporters should be able to access an enhanced version of No Ripcord—but supporting the website must be affordable. We agreed on a fee of $2 per month or $20 per year.

Our goals were simple. Primarily, we wanted to re-establish No Ripcord as a reliable, consistently updated source of honest music criticism, offering high-quality, genuine opinions, free from the influence of conflicts of interest, rather than regurgitated press releases. And our secondary aim? To attract enough supporters to cover all of our running costs by the time this first anniversary rolled around.

We’ll let you be the judge of our quality, but otherwise I am delighted to say we have achieved both goals without compromising on those initial decisions.

Over the summer, our membership hit a level where all of our running costs are fully covered.

After 27 years of running at a loss, No Ripcord is finally paying for itself.

This might sound like a humble achievement, but this level of support secures our future and helps us to remain independent. It also validates our belief that in a world of AI slop and excessive praise—at the time of writing, an astonishing 464 albums out of 536 have an average rating of 70/100 or above on Album of the Year—people care about real people writing honest criticism. And even occasionally awarding scores below 7/10.

In the last year, we have published 196 reviews and 30 features.

That’s 226 articles in total, and this doesn’t include >100 restored articles from our popular archives. That’s almost one new article per working day. We’re pretty happy calling that consistent.

We don’t want to bore you with traffic numbers—to be honest, clicks and page views have never been our thing—but our marked increase in visitor counts correlates with our increase in members. And we continue to grow month on month. Purely for reference, our traffic in September 2026 was more than six times greater than our traffic in November 2025.

For any curious readers, our most popular article since the relaunch is Juan’s Weezer album ranking piece. If you like these, we’ll deliver more.

Every Weezer Album Ranked From Worst to Best | No Ripcord

Of all the modern rock discographies to rank, Weezer’s is probably the trickiest. When a band divides opinion this sharply—even within their own fanbase—you know consensus is out of the question. And yet here we are, ranking Weezer’s fifteen studio albums regardless.

No RipcordJuan Edgardo Rodríguez

When we relaunched, we felt there was still an appetite for a more considered and perhaps more measured form of criticism. While we love curation and recommendations, we strongly believe there’s a place for both. And if you want to read criticism from a truly independent source, that doesn’t rely on maintaining access to artists, or isn’t trying to operate a music festival, or maintain a label, then the non-paywalled options are pretty scarce in 2026. On the one hand, that’s a real shame; on the other, it makes our long-term model more relevant and appealing than it’s ever been.

But where do we go next?

We haven’t radically revised our goals. We’re delighted that enough of you support our vision to allow us to cover our costs. We’re thrilled we’ve produced consistent content over the last 12 months. Our goal is to keep doing all of this, but to do it better.

And that’s where you come in.

Thank you for joining us for the first year of this new phase. If you value what we do but haven’t hit that ‘support us’ button yet, please consider it. We don’t take your backing for granted and really strive to offer value.

Supporters get full access to our acclaimed release schedule, our otherwise paywalled Insider Monthly newsletter, and access to article comments.

But more than that, they get to be part of something pretty unique: a 27-year-old independent music magazine that is somehow just getting started.