story · 3 min
it started in august 2021 as a page where i posted about music i loved. the first posts were about massive attack and autechre. there was no plan. about a year in, people started joining on their own.
on 2 january 2023 we opened the telegram channel with one line, "love music — read it!", and then posted all day: an autechre review, a longread about tim and jeff buckley, our first podcast. the same day we promised "we'll try not to bury you in content". we did bury you. (6, 7, 19, 23, 18)
how it grew:
- may 2023 — 13 people, a donation wallet to buy microphones and stickers (341)
- july 2023 — the first 1,000 readers (451)
- december 2024 — we asked readers in a survey what paprika should become; in january 2025 we showed the new identity at our second birthday in st petersburg (2913, 2930)
- august 2025 — a new line, "people-curated music multimedia", and #paprikasupports, playlists for local artists at the start of their way (3368, 3369)
- 2026 — 32 people in the core team, 33k on instagram, 4.7k on telegram
how it works. three levels: me, curators of departments (editorial, smm, art direction) and the people who make things — writers, editors, designers, interviewers. anyone can move between roles. new people come through open calls, around a hundred applications each time, and i talk to every new member. the team chat passed 100,000 messages in february 2026. (3670)
money. we never had a budget. donations, boosty, a closed "close friends" channel for 300 ₽ a month, postcards, merch, crowdfunding, sponsors. in may 2026 we said it out loud: "we are on the verge of extinction as a team." monetisation, motivation and audience response — none of the three was standing. we declared a moratorium on new projects and focused on finishing the ones we had started. paprika is still here. (3965, 3966)
small things
- the most read interviews are with kedr livanskiy: ~8.5k and ~10k views (3095, 3346)
- yuri saprykin opened our rubric "what is good music?" (2915)
- akira rabelais answered our list of questions with two words: "no lists" (3476)
- the interview with filmmaker vitaly akimov lasted three hours; the interviewer wrote she had to quit her job to be there (3392)
- in december 2025 we left spotify and asked readers to boycott it with us (3589)
- since april 2026 we have a monthly show, "paprika w/", on kurs radio (3943)
partners signal festival (info partner of signal 2025, an interview series and the residency open call; a lecture at signal academy 2026), mmoma (a six-lecture course on sound theory), cisterna × t-bank, beat film festival, ad marginem, prstrnst, aaa magazine, station obninsk, pro:vzglyad, grain, les.
links instagram · telegram · spotify · podcast · interview with me, "chaos is our tone of voice"