Sockpuppet.

Some thoughts on Bandcamp Friday

Bandcamp Friday is a thing that Bandcamp started in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, primarily to help out performing musicians who no longer had access to live performance venues due to the COVID lockdowns. It was a very nice gesture on their part, to help offset some of the suck of the world affecting musicians by waiving their cut of the purchase price.

As someone who wasn’t a performing musician at the time, I still benefitted from it, as it gave me an occasional tiny boost to my (already tiny) music income.

But at this point it’s an entrenched tradition and it’s actually causing more harm than good. It might be time for it to end, or at least be reconsidered.

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Bandcamp Friday, May 2025 edition

Hey y'all! It is Bandcamp Friday once again. Today is the best day to support musicians on Bandcamp (including myself) as Bandcamp waives their cut of the sale price of all music for this day only.

Bandcamp have recently made some default pricing changes and based on their reasoning I have opted to change my own pricing strategy (as hinted at previously). Previously I had a kind of complicated and largely vibes-based approach to pricing, but it was doing me no favors. From now on, all of my albums will be $1/track up to $9, and individual songs will be $1.50/track, with occasional exceptions for certain considerations.

Anyway, for this Bandcamp Friday, you can get 25% off anything in my catalog (including my full discography, which is also always discounted) with the discount code “MAYDAY25.”

Also, as usual, here’s some of the stuff I’ll be buying this month:

And here’s some of my other recommendations for things I already own:

Upcoming shows and appearances

Hey y'all, I’m a very busy bee, with a lot of stuff happening all at once over the next couple months.

This weekend, on Saturay, May 3, my real-life choir is doing a fundraiser show. I will be performing in two pieces, singing tenor in a rendition of Vienna Teng’s The Hymn of Axciom and doing a minimal jazz piano rendition of my own song Repair My Heart.

Then in June, I have a whole bunch of stuff going on:

  • Furality is taking place from June 5-8, and I have a booth in the dealer’s den, where I plan on having some small impromptu performances; you might also find me out and about throughout the rest of the convention, in which case, feel free to come by and say “hi!”
  • My choir will be performing with Rainbow City on June 6 (which I may or may not be a part of, depending on how badly this conflicts with Furality)
  • I will be performing a Pride show with Refraction VR on June 7 May 31!
  • The choir will be doing a preview of our pride show on Vashon Island on June 13 (which I will be a part of)
  • We are also doing our full pride show on June 20 and 21 in Seattle

And I may have another concert happening in June as well! Watch this space! (or better yet, my show calendar)

Bulk-editing Bandcamp per-track pricing

Bandcamp recently rolled out bulk editing for albums, but unfortunately it only lets you bulk-edit album prices, rather than the prices of individual tracks within an album. Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult to do this with a little Javascript.

For each album that you want to change the prices on:

  1. Open up your album’s editor

  2. Open up your browser’s Javascript console (usually using ctrl-alt-I on a PC, or cmd-alt-I on a Mac)

  3. Paste in this bit of code (assuming you want to set the price to 1.50 per track in your local currency; change the '1.50' to whatever value you want it to be otherwise) and press Enter:

    document.querySelectorAll('input.price[name^="track.price"]')
    .forEach(e=>{e.value='1.50';e.dispatchEvent(new Event('change'))})

  4. Verify that the prices are the way you want them and then click “update album”

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Vinyl releases

I recently learned about elasticStage, an on-demand vinyl LP manufacturing company. I’ve always wanted to get some of my albums on vinyl, especially Transitions and Refactor, two albums which are very near and dear to my heart.

As such, I’ve set up an elasticStage page where you can order my stuff on vinyl! I’ll probably add more albums as they come.

I’m still waiting for my test copies to arrive (and they likely won’t arrive for a little while) so if you order a copy right now it’s at your own risk, but all of the reviews I’ve seen of the service are incredibly positive. On Refactor in particular I’ve scheduled it as a preorder to be released on June 14, which is both the 10th anniversary of the original release of the album and also my birthday.

I’ll definitely be reviewing the test copies when they arrive, and if you want to take a chance on something unproven, right now is the time to order, as the actual manufacturing lead time is currently around 6 weeks.

Bandcamp Friday for March 2025

Today, March 7, 2025, is Bandcamp Friday! That means that for the next 23.5 hours as of the time of this posting, Bandcamp waives their cut of the purchase price. So if you have any music you want to buy on Bandcamp, today is the best day to do it.

To that end, I have a new album out, which you might be interested in if you’re seeing this post.

Other than that, there’s what I’ll be buying today:

  • The entire discography of Vulthra
  • I’ll be doing catchup on err:Rawr’s discography
  • And the entire discography of Balance Lost, a Song Fight!er of note

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Fixed some template stuff

For folks who follow this site directly on bluesky you might have noticed that the view there has… problems. I’m mostly posting this to see if some of those problems have been resolved.

Unfortunately, as things stand, bluesky is really just not a great substitute for a proper feed reader, so I’d suggest getting one of those instead rather than trying to have a single social feed be your one view to the universe.

(Following my actual bluesky profile probably is a better experience overall, anyway.)