I’m pleased as punch to have performed at VRelium’s 2025 holiday show, benefitting The Trevor Project. I did not come up with any holiday-appropriate music to sing.

Success updates

First, here’s the criteria I laid out as what I’d see as feeling “successful.”

• The amount of income I get from my music would be sufficient as a living wage

  This is still incredibly far away, and I’m not sure it will ever be achievable with the way the music industry is, especially for independent musicians. It’s also kind of a low priority for me, though, as my other sources of income are sufficient for now.

• Any time I release something new, I have a fanbase that acquires it without prompting

  This isn’t something I’ve really had a good measure of, but I will say that this still hasn’t been the case for my two releases this year

• Any release pays for its own production costs within its first month of release

  I’d say I still haven’t hit this benchmark just yet. Neither of my releases this year cost in terms of software or equipment (in that I didn’t have to buy anything new for them), but like, I’m still super far in the hole in terms of my startup costs, and even distributing The War Machine to streaming cost $5 which I haven’t yet recouped.

  strawberry jelly :9 has made around $94 this year, though, and I also got a job out of it, so, that’s worth something.

• I have enough fans that YouTube actively tries to retain my content rather than treating my channel as a liability

  This still hasn’t quite changed, although I’m starting to feel it turn a corner, especially with my move to self-administering my videos. (On that note, gosh, I’m falling behind on that project…)

• Any release I put out gets visibility in the various streaming platforms' algorithms

  Nope, but also I’ve decided to just not care about streaming for now, which feels like a much healthier solution to the problem.

• People approach me to express interest in hiring me

  This is something that’s changed! In that, as mentioned, some of the work I did on strawberry jelly :9 got me hired as the composer for a small game. It isn’t much, but it’s something.

• Concert organizers approach me to express interest in me performing with them

  And this one I can happily say has definitely been satisfied; quite a few of my VRChat performances have now been things where people approached me to play at them, instead of me needing to seek out and apply for things.

• I am approached with offers for representation, either via an agent or a record label

  I am still not signed with a record label (and at this point I’m not sure I even want to be), but I do have a booking agent for my VRChat shows! And she’s the one who approached me with the idea, after having booked me for a couple of events.

• I have people trying to interpret my songs on their own, whether correctly or incorrectly, and reading their own meaning into them regardless

  This has happened a little bit. So far as I know nobody’s yet to submit their own interpretations to Genius or whatever, but people have asked questions about some of my lines, and that’s a good first step!

Also, here’s a thing I didn’t think of on the original list but which is something that I feel is very much worth celebrating:

• People start to recognize me for my music

  And this is another cool thing that’s been happening. The performances I’ve done in VRChat have led to people recognizing me as a musician in random places and folks will even compliment me on my music. More than one person has even had a favorite song of mine! (It seems to be tied between Freak Flag and Material Change.)

  I also got a surge of interest and recognition after my presence at Furality. (Also a nice little spike of streaming playtime, which unfortunately didn’t last long.)

  It’s still only something that occurs in very small pockets in VRChat, and is often intertwined with the work I do for Trans Academy, but it’s been super gratifying and feels great.

The year in review

Here’s a breakdown of some of my activity:

• Released one single and one album
• Got hired on a game OST as a result of the album
• Finally got a bunch of my albums re-released on CD
• Did a bit more Novembeat than last year, and ended up writing a few new songs for an upcoming album as a result
• Performed a bunch of shows, mostly in VR but one in real life as well
• Made about $450 on Bandcamp, $30 on Mirlo, and $3 that I’ll never see on streaming platforms
• Also got a decent chunk of change from the Internet Archive show (which I really need to get around to posting, oops) — I can highly recommend the experience to anyone who’s interested in applying!
• Revamped my YouTube channel and got a lot more visibility as a result
• Completely changed the way I do my live performances, including producing a bunch of backing tracks to add to the experience

Looking forward

In 2026, as usual, I hope to get a couple of albums done. Here’s what’s on my current backlog (which is, regrettably, nearly the exact same backlog as I had for 2025):

• The next collection of random unreleased songs to be released (including a bunch of Song Fight! and some other random things I’ve had sitting around for ages)
• A self-cover album, where I want to revamp some of my older songs based on how I perform them today
• A jazz album!
• An album full of covers of more famous/popular music (this one will be tricky and expensive to get all the proper licenses for it)
• And of course, the full OST for the game I’m working on

I also want to get the rest of my back-catalog up on YouTube, which would be a lot easier if I stop thinking that I need to go overboard on the visualizers, and I also want to get some work done on a Canimus-enabled player of some sort. Which isn’t super relevant to making music, but it’s very relevant to helping musicians to be heard in general.

Finally, my plan for performing has been to do 1-2 bigger shows a month, and I’m pretty sure that’s something that I can make happen.

I performed a half-hour set with Skyline Festival on November 21! The show was for the benefit of Feeding America, a very important charity in this day and age.

Website

I’ve been slowly working on fully tagging all of my releases. At this point it’s at about 90% coverage, with nearly everything having genre tags and most things also having instrument and mood tags.

Novembeat

Some years I produce a lot of music for Novembeat. Some years, not so much. Usually it ends up with an album at the end.

So far I’ve made 10 tracks (all posted on the YouTube playlist) which is on the low end but it’s been fun to play with things all the same. I might do more this month although I haven’t been super motivated. The last few tracks I worked on I at least streamed live on YouTube which was a lot of fun.

Some of the tracks I’ve made so far are ones that I definitely want to revisit as full tracks and don’t want to do a half-assed release at the end of the month, and the other tracks are ones that are fun as tooling around but nothing I am really super inspired to release on an album, so I think this year I’m just going to limit it to the playlist (same as I did last year) and treat it as a fun exercise instead of it being A Thing. Especially since I no longer really feel the pressure to feed the streaming algorithms.

New music

I’m still working on the soundtrack for a game, and it’s coming¹ along nicely. Our goal is to release the game in 2026, although there’s nothing more firm than that which I can disclose publicly.

I’m also continuing to work on music for some other clients, and collecting more ideas/gumption for whittling down my album production backlog.

Performances

I’m excited for two performances, Skyline Aurora Fest this Friday and the Trans Furs Support System anniversary show next Saturday. I’ve upgraded my performance setup even further to make these the best shows I can. Some highlights:

• I’m now using backing tracks combined with live instruments, and many of the backing tracks are specific to my live performances with new arrangements
• I have a pretty complete pedalboard that gives me much more control over my live sound, including a proper reverb setup
• I’ve switched to using some wireless IEMs that give me a lot more freedom within my VR playspace and cuts down on the fragility of my monitoring setup

I’m also trying to get in on the beta for the EOZ immersive gloves in order to get proper hand tracking while I perform, although it’ll still be some time before that happens. Right now it’s definitely the most promising option that’s coming to market in the foreseeable future.

YouTube channel update

Switching to self-administered releases on my channel has been the best decision I’ve made, for unexpected reasons.

Normally, when releasing music to YouTube, you have to go through a distributor, i.e. the same companies that put music on services like Spotify and Apple Music. Technically, YouTube Music releases are separate from regular YouTube, and the “official artist channel” function is just a way of getting YouTube Music releases to appear on the “releases” tab of the official artist website.

The plus side to this method is that all music listened through YouTube Music gets administered like any other music stream, and YouTube pays out around half a penny per play, which isn’t nothing. And it’s also nice that these releases show up on the release tab, and have all of the necessary metadata for music business things. But it has several downsides as well:

• There’s basically no control over what appears on the video description
• There’s no control over what the video content actually is (generally it’s just a static image of the cover art)
• There’s no way to directly provide synchronized lyrics/subtitles, auto-captioned or otherwise, unless it’s a feature provided by your distributor (and setting that up at the distributor side is a pain in the butt)
• The artist has absolutely no control over how anything is organized
• YouTube Music plays do nothing to help with discovery within the greater YouTube algorithm and doesn’t affect the artist’s YouTube watch stats
• Listeners aren’t actually directed to the musician’s channel (at least, not reliably) and there’s no real integration between YouTube Music and general YouTube following
• The artist doesn’t benefit from any of YouTube’s copyright tools beyond what their distributor makes available (usually at great added expense and with exceptionally poor granularity)

And none of these are issues for self-administered videos! So far I’ve had the following benefits already:

• People have discovered my music through the regular YouTube recommendation feed
• I’ve hit a new watch time milestone which is good for the ol' dopamine factory
• I’m having a lot of fun figuring out various forms of audio visualizer on the videos
• I am able to do my own copyright administration based on my own preferences

It isn’t perfect, of course. Since I’m going through regular YouTube plays, I don’t automatically get paid for listens (not that I was making that much to begin with), although hopefully I’ll hit a monetization threshold at some point. Also, if someone does get recommended a song through the feed, they’ll just get it on its own with no link into its respective playlist (although I suppose I could at least put a link in the description). Also there’s no way for me to organize playlists into groups; I think that feature does become available to larger creators, but I haven’t hit whatever threshold is necessary for that just yet.

I could do more whole-album videos to preserve the album-oriented listening experience, and I’ll probably get around to doing that when I’m done clearing this reupload backlog.

But anyway

I am a busy bee and I still have to manage my energy and chronic pain (and being up this late to blog about it certainly isn’t helping). But things are feeling pretty okay right now.

1. heh ↩

I’ll replace the Refactor videos with the new ones on Monday because they new ones are way better and that album is pretty special to me (and I’ll just delist the old videos rather than delete them outright), but I think I’ll leave Radio Ready and Instrumental alone.

In any case here’s my current tentative YouTube album rerelease schedule:

which would actually cover my entire back-catalog, aside from Wiener Dog on a Motorcycle (which I still want to do a full music video for instead of a visualizer release) and pointed little quill which is still available on YouTube Music.

Of course this is subject to change due to any number of factors, especially if I actually manage to get one of my backburnered albums out in the interim.

My current plan is to do two releases per week; on Mondays will be what I consider my “real” or “authored” albums, and Thursdays will be what I consider “jam” albums. The categorization of these is a little wishy-washy, but for example, things I’ve done for Novembeat and Strawberry Jam are “jam” albums, while things like Refactor and Songs of Substance are “authored” albums.

Release schedule (intended)

This is my current release schedule plan:

There’s a bunch of albums not yet on that list and I’m not sure if I want them to have YouTube rereleases just yet. I’ll probably use the empty Mondays to release them, possibly in groups (for example, several of the game jam OSTs are quite short).

Some technical details

To actually make the videos I’ve finally wrapped my head around how FFmpeg filter graphs work, and I’m building up a little repertoire of visual hacks that let me make the various things look nice.

For example, here’s the Novembeat 2020 video setup files, for those who are interested. FFmpeg scripts aren’t super easy to comment, but probably the trickiest thing is the way the remap filter works; basically, the X and Y channels must be in 16-bit grayscale mode, and directly reference pixel coordinates, but it’s not super easy to set up colors like that in Affinity Studio (my graphics editor of choice) so instead I draw things as a grayscale ramp (which end up with values 0-65535 in the 16-bit mapping) and then scale it down to try to map them to 0-255. Buuuuut Affinity also ends up dithering gradients regardless of colorspace or settings, so there needs to be a bit of fudging there too. (In retrospect this is something that would have probably worked better with GNU IMP, which has native support for 16-bit grayscale images.)

Update: Nope GNU IMP’s UI is still complete garbage for this and wouldn’t have improved things. I guess in the future I’ll just want to, like, write code.

As far as uploaading the videos goes, I wrote a Python script which is rather involved in its setup (since it requires setting up a Google developer account and a “cloud application”) and which I can only run a few times a day due to the somewhat annoying way that YouTube’s API limits work. But my process is basically:

1. Encode all my videos (using the Bandcrash FLAC files as the input source)
2. Drag them (15 at a time) to the YouTube uploader
3. Add them all to a new playlist
4. Download the playlist metadata
5. Reconcile the playlist metadata with my Bandcrash album data to automatically generate titles and descriptions
6. Apply that new data to the YouTube videos and simultaneously schedule them for publication on release day

It’s a bit annoying but not nearly as annoying as having to hand-edit the descriptions and post schedule.

Some future things

I really want to do a proper music video for Wiener Dog on a Motorcycle. I’ve had a very strong image in my head for how it should look. If any animators are interested in taking it on as a gig, let me know. I need to at least do a storyboard and possibly an animatic myself, I think.

On top of all this I still have so many backburnered album projects, and of course I still have 25 days of Novembeat left to do…

1. This would be a music-only release, rather than the existing music videos playlist which has a bunch of non-music stuff in it and is missing the last track, which currently only appears in the full video. ↩

2. This will also coincidentally be the same intended day as the album release of Novembeat 2025, but that will already have been on YouTube since I’m using that as my primary incremental release mechanism. ↩

Hey y'all! As you might know, I coordinate an annual song-a-day challenge called Novembeat, where in November you try to make something musical every day. Several of my albums have been produced that way, and last year, in lieu of doing the traditional challenge (aside from a handful of low-effort experiments) I mostly used the month as a push to finally finish up Transitions.

I’ve always found Novembeat to be a very helpful thing for feeling unstuck with my own musical pursuits, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get a bit more practice with any aspect of the music creation process.

My suggestion is to only do it to the level for which you feel it’s helpful. Don’t burn yourself out on music trying to produce something if it isn’t flowing; the point is to challenge yourself, not to push yourself to the breaking point. Most years I haven’t actually done something every day, and getting anything done means there’s now more music in the world than there was before, and that can only be a good thing.

Anyway, think of this as an invitation to join in. Or if a weekly-ish cadence is more your speed, check out Song Fight!, which I wrote about recently.

Music distribution stuff

While it took a bit longer than expected, the removal of (most of) our music from streaming services has finally mostly gone through in most places.

To that end, we are finally starting to upload individual tracks to YouTube, although that process is going to take a little while. Rather than just put a bunch of boring thumbnail-and-audio videos up, I want everything to have at least some amount of a visual element. For Transitions it was easy enough to do visualizer tracks since those had already been done for the full album video, and of course I’d already done this for Novembeat 2021 and 2022 as part of the production of those albums, but for the other albums I’ll probably just be doing a simple waveform plot like I did for Strawberry Jams I Ate since that’s easy to automate.

Anyway, in other distribution news, a while back, I started drafting a specification called Canimus (the name is a Latin word that broadly means “we make music”) to allow music providers to syndicate their music easily, and I’ve been working with a few other folks to try to work out some of the hairier details. As it stands the protocol is ready for my own use case and for anyone who is just interested in publishing a feed to the public Internet, but of course there’s going to have to be some long-term thoughts around some of the trickier legal things to deal with. But there are also folks already building player engines, and Sockpuppet’s full catalog is available for streaming, at least.

Unfortunately the actual conversation is scattered between a few different spots, although it’s mostly being discussed on Mirlo’s Discord with some other conversations happening over on The Social Music Network, which is also a great community to join if you have any interest in talking about the future of independent music on the Internet. Ideally discussion about the protocol itself will take place on the Canimus GitHub discussions board.

Other musical projects

As far as music production goes, we are currently busy with the following:

• Actively working on the soundtrack for a video game
• Making music for a couple of ongoing clients
• Preparing for Novembeat

And the following album projects are currently on the backburner:

• The next album of Song Fight! and Song Fight!-adjacent songs
• An album of covers of other peoples' music we’ve done over the years
• An album of reimagining a bunch of our old songs into new styles or with updated sensibiliies
• A jazz album

As you might imagine, every member of the band is quite busy!

My first batch of CDs from Kunaki arrived today, and here’s a brief review of how they turned out.

(Short version: They’re great!)

I ordered a set of one of each of my first 12 CDs that I had set up with them, namely:

• foodsexsleep
• Love and Monsters
• Radio Ready
• Refactor
• Novembeat 2020
• Songs of Substance
• Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To
• Original Soundtrack
• Pawmune and Friends
• Instrumental
• Notions
• Transitions

I placed the order on October 13, and the order was shipped out the very next day, and arrived just two days later, even though they were shipped USPS Media Mail. They came direct from Kunaki’s manufacturing facility in Sparks, Nevada.

Every single CD came shrinkwrapped and felt very professionally-assembled. The print quality is also quite good, much better than from the other short-run manufacturers I’ve used. The downside is that they only support two-panel inserts, so for some of my legacy releases I had to scale back the artwork; this was particularly sad for Refactor and Love and Monsters, both of which I had a full spread set up, and on this rerelease I had to pare it back considerably.

But the color quality is great and it turned out exactly as I’d expected. (It looks much better in person than what this picture from my unsteady phone camera would indicate.)

Also, because of the minimal insert capabilities, on some of the releases where I didn’t have better ideas of what to put inside, I opted to squeeze all of the lyrics onto a single panel. While you’ll probably need a magnifying glass to read it, it’s still perfectly sharp and readable.

The only complaint I have is that the layout teplates Kunaki provided were very minimal and it was difficult to get an idea of where the bleed/crop/trim/bend marks would be, and they don’t seem to be symmetrical. As a result, the spines are a bit inconsistent and not quite up to professional standards:

But it’s Good Enough for now and it’s only the back-facing spine that seems to be affected. I’ll definitely be tweaking my layout templates going forward, though.

Anyway, the other thing I was concerned about was the print quality for the CD labels themselves, and I’m happy to say that they look fantastic.

As far as the actual CD replication goes, I was impressed to see that even though they’re burned CDs, they look just like a pressed CD to me. And of course, the CDs play just fine in both my Playstation 2 and on my Windows computer with its external optical drive.

And, thanks to the gapless mastering from Bandcrash, the tracks all flow exactly as they’re intended to, with no extra gaps. The albums that I uploaded using Kunaki’s per-track uploader do have two-second gaps between them, unfortunately, but going forward I’m always going to use Bandcrash for my CD authoring, because it Just Works and is a hell of a lot easier to deal with anyway.

So, anyway, yeah. Kunaki’s output is great and while I wish they had a four-panel insert option and slightly more flexibility in their authoring process (like supporting CD-Text and such), their output is professional and I absolutely recommend the service to anyone who’s interested in short-run CD manufacturing and drop-shipping.

If you’ve poked around this website you probably know that I wrote and use Bandcrash to build the embedded players for the music previews. You might also be aware of it as the tool that I use to publish my albums to my itch.io page as an alternative to Bandcamp. But I also use it as a tool for a bunch of other things in my music — including part of how I publish things to Bandcamp and other storefronts.

Here’s some ways in which I use it.

Improving my production workflow

By maintaining my albums in Bandcrash as I work on them, it gives me a nice local player that lets me preview how the music is going to sound in context, since it can help me maintain my track ordering without having to do a lengthy/slow upload process or deal with playlists and libraries in VLC or iTunes or the like. It also gives me a place to edit and preview the liner notes and lyrics sheets.

Also, it’s easy for me to upload the previewer to a website and have other people do test listens.

Improving distribution to other platforms

When it’s time to upload to the various services, it acts as a force-multiplier in a few ways:

• I can encode the whole album as FLAC and then easily drag-and-drop the files to the mirlo uploader, which then parses all of the tags and gives me the correct track ordering, genre tags, and lyrics
• I already have edited plaintext lyrics and liner notes that I can easily copy-paste into the Bandcamp editor
• The FLAC version is also much faster to upload to Bandcamp than the WAV version, and since I already have my track order set, I don’t need to think about things a whole bunch
• The butler integration with itch.io automatically uploads all versions there with no real effort on my part
• The pre-built .zip files are super easy to sell or distribute on other platforms, such as Patreon, Ko-Fi, and Gumroad

Authoring and uploading CDs for manufacturing

Kunaki’s standard album uploader is a pain to work with and results in albums with forced 2-second gaps between songs. With the brand-new CD authoring flow that I released yesterday, it is now much, much easier to publish an album to Kunaki, as now there are only two files to upload (the .bin and the .cue), and everything turns out exactly as it does when played in the local player with gapless transitions.

Also, external authoring tools are the only way to support more than 25 tracks on a single album with Kunaki, and I couldn’t find anything else that works nearly as well for this, which is why I added this functionality to Bandcrash to begin with.

Any service that can take .bin and .cue files would be able to use this, and even if you just want to burn a bunch of CDs on your own, you can use these files with cdrdao or ImgBurn or any number of other tools that take bin/cue files, and not have to worry about setting up a bunch of stuff.

And, as a bonus, you’ll get CD-Text¹, so your titles and genres and such will Just Work™ on fancier CD players and peoples' computers.

Game OST workflow

I compose music for games and this usually means producing both BGM (looping backgroud music) and OST (downloadable soundtrack) versions of things. While I work on the soundtrack for a game, I maintain separate Bandcrash projects for each of these, and then I use Bandcrash to encode the looping versions into .ogg format so that I can share them with the game designers easily.

In some rare cases I also use Bandcrash’s “itch channel prefix” functionality to simultaneously upload both versions to the itch page, so that both versions are separately available.

[ADVANCED] Maintaining this website

This website runs Publ, a blogging platform I designed a while back. When I do a release, I run a few scripts to populate the information onto this website:

1. A script that converts Bandcamp’s JSON-LD data to Publ pages for the album, tracks, and lyrics (so that my URL structure matches the Bandcamp structure and uses the same slug generation), using Bandcamp’s embedded player
2. Another script that runs Bandcrash on the album, uploads the preview player to my CDN, and then switches my own embedded players over to the Bandcrash player

Also, for the spots where my liner notes had more advanced Markdown in them than what Bandcamp can display, I can also copy-paste the Markdown from my Bandcrash liner notes, and this would be super easy to automate as well.

These scripts are super specific to my own setup, somewhat janky, and probably wouldn’t be super useful for others, but at some point I’ll probably opensource them along with the Publ templates for this website, because it’s nice to provide people with more options for how to maintain their online presence. Even if it can be a bit technical.

In conclusion

Bandcrash is a pretty useful tool, and since its file format is just JSON files you can probably come up with some even more interesting use cases for it as a data editor.

It’s also pretty rough and could use a lot of improving; fortunately, it’s open source, as is its player component, and of course I welcome contributions, in both the “code and issues” sense as well as the financial sense.

Anyway, if you’re someone who makes music and publishes it online or on CD, check it out. Maybe you’ll find it useful too!

1. Depending on the manufacturer. Unfortunately, Kunaki does not have any way to support this. ↩

So, for now I’ve come to a compromise: if you want to buy just the CD of any of my albums, you can do so directly through Kunaki. Note that these versions do not come with downloads, and more importantly, since I’m only charging minimal markup over my own costs, I ask that you only buy the CDs there if you’ve already bought the album digitally (including via one of my discography bundles).

Using that link will give you the best shipping rates (especially if you buy multiple albums at a time or are outside the USA) and is also a lot less hassle for me, so it’s a win-win.

On that note, if you want to buy a CD for an album you don’t own just yet, it’s actually a bit easier and cheaper for everyone if you buy the album digitally and then use my Kunaki store to get the CD. Or, you could buy just the CD and rip it yourself like it’s 2003, and then send me a few bucks some other way to make up the difference.

Anyway, now you have choices for obtaining more collectible forms of my music without it being super expensive.

Thanks for listening!

I definitely want to put Novembeat 2020 on CD but unfortunately that will require some extra process, as it has 29 tracks and Kunaki’s online tool only supports up to 25. There’s a workaround for that but unfortunately it will take some time to figure out how to actually do it suitably.

On that note: If anyone knows of any good DAO authoring tools, ideally which run on a Mac, please let me know! In the meantime, Kunaki does have a somewhat roundabout approach which involves me burning a CD-R and then ripping it back with their own software, but that’s… fraught, and I’m not sure I even have any viable CD-Rs anymore. (I somehow doubt the big cheap spindle I bought on clearance from CompUSA is still any good…)

Update: I ended up just doing it myself, and this functionality is now part of Bandcrash. Also my big cheap spindle was still good!

But anyway, there haven’t been a lot of responses on the poll and I’m holding out optimism for the idea that it’s just because people haven’t made up their mind yet and not that nobody wants to buy anything.

I performed two short sets at the Trans Academy’s “Moonlit” concert series, for the milestone 100th week of Moonlit EU! For this one I made four new backing tracks and learned in real time just how bad I am at playing funk guitar.

If you buy from Bandcamp or Mirlo the album will also come with the digital download in your choice of formats.

Anyway, inside you can vote on which additional albums I should focus on making available!

I’ve only listed the ones that I’m particularly interested in setting up, but if there’s one I haven’t listed that you want, feel free to write it in.

Also at some point I will get around to doing CD setup for elasticStage for folks in Europe, but their setup process is quite a bit more involved so it hasn’t been a priority. It’ll come eventually, though!

But doing so also required, for very annoying reasons, removing it from all other streaming platforms as well, because the distributor I was working with, TooLost, had no option for removing music from just one platform without deleting and re-uploading everything².

So, when is my music going to get back onto the other streaming platforms? Ehhh.

Why we’re at this point

The state of affairs for independent music distribution is a horror show. Every distributor I’ve used has been a nightmare to work with in some way, and has ended up costing me far more in my dealings with them than I’ve ever made back. I’ve made probably around $100³ in total over the past 20 years from streaming. It has cost me a lot more than $100 to make my music available on streaming⁴.

Meanwhile, the “best” month I’ve ever had on streaming was the month after Furality Somna, where I got a brief surge of interest on Spotify, but not enough of one to actually get any of the sustainable characteristics that one would expect. The people who listened to my stuff didn’t keep listening to it, my work never ended up in any recommendation feeds or popular playlists, and even with the amount of direct interest I got, I only ended up making around $7, which isn’t even enough to receive a payment from my distributor. And it only pays for about two months of distribution fees anyway.

I’ve also written extensively about the problems with streaming platforms and Spotify in particular, and that’s not an industry I really want to support right now. In addition to Spotify’s issues, I’ve also learned of reasons to distrust Apple Music and Tidal, for example their partnerships with Rekordbox which makes it so that DJs can stream artists' music into their mixes without materially supporting said artists beyond “exposure.”

I’ve also had great difficulty with getting my music onto streaming platforms to begin with these days. In addition to costing considerably more to get distribution than I can ever expect to receive in return, every distributor has succumbed to the problems with a glut of AI submissions, where they have lost all trust in musicians who haven’t already made it big, and provide Kafka-esque hoops to jump through to prove that my music was made by me. This isn’t entirely the fault of the distributors, but it is a symptom of a deeply broken industry.

I have also applied to many record labels but they only want to sign up-and-coming musicians, not ones with a deep catalog of what they see as unsuccessful releases, or they want people with a much larger social media presence and a fanbase which would be large enough for me to not need a label to begin with. I am not a social media darling (nor do I want to be), and I just plain don’t have it in me to try to get what they want of me.

So I’m focusing on what I have control over.

Where we are right now

At the moment, my plan is to do the following:

• Continue to focus on Bandcamp, Mirlo, itch.io, and the other storefronts that value creators and listeners, and evangelizing a return to people owning their own collections
• Switch to fully-self-managing the releases on my YouTube and Peertube channels, and hopefully at least keep my stuff available through YouTube Music in that way
• Focus on building my audience through live performances and commissions
• Continue to work towards a fair streaming future and other grassroots efforts like KVRR and TheIndieBeat

This isn’t permanent

If someone can point me to a fair, ethically-managed distributor that supports independent musicians (rather than using the promise of winning the lottery to keep us constantly buying tickets), I would certainly consider reuploading my catalog somewhere.

What do I think counts as ethical in this case?

• Charging an affordable, sustainable amount for the distribution and maintenance of the catalog (even if this means both an annual fee and a royalty cut)
• Providing reasonable tools for bulk import/upload of releases (rather than everything being an accessibility nightmare)
• Providing actual support to artists who need it, not copy-pasted brush-off responses
• Timely distribution of royalty payments, with regular (e.g. annual) lump-sum payments irrespective of minimum thresholds
• The ability to pick and choose which streaming platforms works go onto, and the ability to change this later (with takedowns and redistributions on a per-platform basis)
• Actually investigating claims of playlist fraud instead of categorically taking down entire catalogs based on a mere suspicion from a platform (and in the meantime, at most only suspending the suspected works on the suspected platforms, not a full takedown from every service)

None of these feel very likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But also, the entire streaming music industry needs to change for me to want to really participate in it, and I don’t see that happening either. Too much about how the industry works is based around the demands of the major labels in order to keep the major-label content available, even though their requirements ultimately end up working against their interests as well!

Alternately, if any of the streaming platforms were to allow artists to directly upload and self-distribute to them while still earning royalties⁵, that would be peachy.

One size does not fit all

I know many musicians for whom this path would not make any sense. Last night at an open mic I was talking about this with a friend, and he was very surprised to hear about my experiences with streaming vs. sales; he makes substantial amounts of money from streaming, and very little from Bandcamp (and what he pays to get his stuff on Bandcamp hasn’t paid for his Bandcamp earnings).

A big part of that is that he primarily records and releases covers of popular music. As a result, he ends up getting his audience from people looking for popular songs, and this led to a level of sustainability that works in his favor. This is also why Bandcamp has been a money pit for him, because mechanical licenses for purchase are significantly more expensive than those for streaming.

But by the same token, what works for other musicians has not worked for me. Why should I keep playing the game when I have 20+ years of experience telling me that it just plain isn’t worthwhile for me to do so?

Anyway. I do not need streaming in order to feel successful. So for now I’m opting out.

Maybe in the future this will change. But dealing with the stresses and frustration of streaming is the least important thing to me right now with everything else going on in my life.

1. Yes, I realize Daniel Ek “stepped down” as CEO, but only by becoming the chairman of the board. He is now essentially the CEO’s boss, and still the majority shareholder, so this doesn’t actually change anything vis-a-vis my issues with Spotify. ↩

2. I also had to pay $3 to do it because TooLost was holding my catalog hostage, but that’s just pocket change in the grand scheme of things. ↩

3. Or rather, I’ve had numbers in a database totalling around that amount, but I can’t even withdraw a bunch of it because it’s all in little pieces that are below their respective distributors' payout thresholds, where they will sit forever. ↩

4. It’s hard to put an actual number on it, but I do know I’ve spent at least this much: ↩

   • $225 for two albums distributed via CDBaby in the early days
   • $125 for an album distributed via TuneCore in the early days
   • At least $275 for the years I subscribed to DistroKid and TooLost
   • A few hundred bucks on SoundCloud Pro
   • A lot of time and effort and energy spent dealing with all this nonsense, and that isn’t free and has probably taken years off my life with the stress

5. Tidal Upload, sadly, does not count: ↩

   Does the music that I upload earn royalties on TIDAL?

   No, your uploaded files do not earn royalties.