XLR8R has an announcement to make: moving forward, our mixes—the podcast series and all—will all be hosted on Mixcloud Select, a fan-to-creator membership layer to Mixcloud that enables audio creators to get direct support from their fans.

We have a number of motivations for making this switch, but fundamentally it’s because we believe that creators—in this case, the producers; those making the tracks in the music—should be paid for their work. With this move, each time you listen to a mix, the producers will be paid.

We explained this in more length earlier this year in our feature Creators Must Be Paid for their Art: What Needs to Happen?, written by Sam Davies, and you can take a read through that to learn more.

This doesn’t mean that we won’t be using Soundcloud, however. We’ll still be uploading all of our mixes there, for you listen to when and where you want, but if you want to listen to these mixes offline—if you want to download—then you’ll need to swing by Mixcloud, where the mix will be ready and available for Mixcloud Select subscribers to download to the Mixcloud app.

Subscription costs $2.99/month. Of that fee, 60% goes toward the artists, labels, and publishers who own the rights to the tracks played in that creator’s shows, as well as a small credit card processing fee of 5%. The other 30% is then split between the Select “creator”—in this instance, XLR8R—and Mixcloud, which will allow them to invest back into the platform and keep things running.

Remember: this is directly supporting the artists who are making the music that you enjoy. Without them, this scene couldn’t operate.

In addition to this, the weekly XLR8R podcast, which arrives every Tuesday and has done for over 500 consecutive weeks, will now be available early on Mixcloud, as a little treat for those who have subscribed. We’ll also be adding regular mixes, live and studio, which will only be available via Mixcloud.

One important caveat to this, however: all mixes will be added to the XLR8R+ member’s area once they’re uploaded for streaming, so XLR8R+ members have direct access to the mixes.

You can learn more about Mixcloud Select here, and subscribe to XLR8R‘s Mixcloud Select channel here, starting with a mix from Answer Code Request.