Vital Weekly

Frequently Given Answers

  1. vital@vitalweekly.net is the only contact e-mail address for Vital Weekly. Addresses mentioned in reviews otherwise have nothing to do with Vital Weekly. Rightly so, they are highly annoyed if you contact them for issues dealing with Vital Weekly. So, please don’t.
  2. You can send your material for review to:
    Frans de Waard
    Acaciastraat 11
    6521 NE Nijmegen
    The Netherlands

    PLEASE DO NOT SEND AND ANY JAZZ OR FREE JAZZ MUSIC, WE HAVE NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WRITING ABOUT THIS KIND OF MUSIC
  3. Vital Weekly only handles all physical formats: vinyl, CD, CDR, cassette, vinyl, DVD – and we can’t take videos. We don’t accept non-physical, MP3, FLAC, waves, and download codes or links to share sites or Bandcamp. If you intend to send your entire label’s catalogue, please don’t. Pick your highlights. No more than three releases at a time. Also, the material should not be older than six months. If released earlier, we will not review it. We don’t discuss this policy. Please send the real thing (i.e. as released), not a CDR copy of vinyl, CD or cassette with bad xeroxed artwork. Just send the actual item as released. So, also no CDR of something that can be otherwise only purchased as a download. Marked promo is okay (but keep in mind, and we are honest about this, everything we get is for sale later on, so we can devote all our working time to reviewing, so scratching the word promo on every inch of the package doesn’t help). Also, there is no point in sending an e-mail with ‘your review download copy is here’ – we won’t look at it.
  4. Ok, so not everything. We don’t review demos. We review stuff that anyone can buy, no matter how small the edition is. We review only physical products, stuff that people buy and can keep in their hands. We understand that labels release label samplers to promote their label. Hand those to your customers, and not send them to us. We are not fond of reviewing label samplers.
  5. Postage is a bitch, everywhere (almost). We are very well aware of that. Feel free to remove any jewel case, obviously.
  6. If the postman rings our doorbell and says, “here’s a package, and you need to pay taxes and duties”, then we kindly refuse to fork out the money. Always mark your parcel with a value of no more than 0 euros/dollars/whatever (if possible), and hopefully, it will slip through. The postman will return refused packages. We know that sounds harsh, but we don’t have the money to pay for this. Please get in touch with us if you want to send us material outside the EU. We have a small survey for you.
  7. We don’t review any MP3 releases. But maybe I said that already?
  8. If for whatever reason, you send an item for the second time (maybe because you missed out on the review for the first time, or the label mailed it already etc.), we can not pay for the return postage. We’re sorry about that.
  9. If you want to be a writer for Vital Weekly, then mail a couple of your reviews to vital@vitalweekly.net. If you are accepted, you must arrange your promotional material
  10. Staalplaat hosted Vital Weekly for ten years, but Vital Weekly is an independent newsletter. We have no ties to Staalplaat, nor are we the buyer for Staalplaat. Therefore, there is no point in asking us anything about Staalplaat. Sending material for review in Vital Weekly only and not to be placed on the Staalplaat catalogue.
  11. Vital used to be a paper magazine, from 1986-1995. In 2020 a book was published to collects all 44 issues still available.
  12. We select material for the podcast, but we always ask permission with the label (not the artist). Suppose the consent arrives too late, then it’s too bad. We send Vital Weekly out usually on Tuesday (give or take) and prepare the podcast Monday afternoon. Podcasts do generally not include cassettes or vinyl; only when we can use a download code we will have them. We don’t rip music from other media than CDs.
  13. Material for announcements should be with us well in advance, say a week before the event (or some such) happens. Don’t place us on regular mailings, as we usually ignore them. Also, please don’t send any JPEGs, PDFs. We will trash them right away. The language should be English, ignoring all other languages…
  14. Vital Weekly is a labour of love and devotion. We are strictly (and proud) to be independent. No label pays us, and we don’t have ads; we pay the postage to send material to other reviewers. We pay for our server space. The editor has more or less a full day job doing Vital Weekly and does that without any extra income. Therefore, we don’t keep everything we get. We sell some of the stuff to devoted music lovers. That’s how we can preserve our independence. This policy is not open for discussion. If you read this after you found this ‘half hidden garage sale’, you should have read this page sooner, for instance, when you were sending a promo. Like it says in every Vital Weekly, read this page. It means you agree with these terms. Feel free to donate via Patreon or PayPal.
  15. Feel free to communicate (or read this about our work). Usually, people get in contact after what they feel is a negative review. There is no point in starting your discussion with: “You get too much music, so I doubt whether you heard my thing more than once” – I can only reply: ‘how do you know we played it at all?’ Sometimes once is enough, and sometimes a dozen is not. And, no, we don’t record how often we play a specific release before reviewing. If you don’t like reviews to be bad, don’t send anything or simply try to blackmail the reviewer.
  16. Vital Weekly holds no copyright. Any review may be published anywhere. Please be kind and tell me where it came from. If we do run a review with copyright, we’ll let you know.