Heartbreak on Vinyl by Blake Lewis: The sophmore album of my favorite American Idol finalist, with some pretty nice lush electropop/dance vibes on this one
Hey y'all, I’m trying to figure out when I should schedule my next VRChat concert for. If you’d be so kind, please head over to this poll and click on the times which work well for you. (Remember to set your timezone as well!)
As an independent musician who is also a (former-ish) software engineer who is keenly all-too-aware of technology and the development of the web, I would personally love to see a much better ecosystem of independent music distribution and discovery that isn’t reliant on any one company or platform, or even a handful of them.
When discussing some of the alternate paths that people can take, it’s important to know what’s out there and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
So hey, I’ve been working on improving the tag browser in the releases section, and have it to a point where the browser itself is, I think, really good? All that’s left to do is to tag all of the songs. I have, uh, a lot of tagging left to do. I built some tools to make it a bit easier, at least, but it’s still going to take me quite some time.
Anyway, while tagging music, I’ve been spending some quality time just listening to other peoples' music. Here’s a few things that I’ve enjoyed recently.
Earlier today I was in a conversation with Jeremy about what it means to be successful.
The gist of the conversation is that pretty much everyone, especially those working in music, always have such a relative, subjective idea of what it means to be “successful,” and the overarching constant seems to be that even people who are making a sustainable living at music, and who have a respectful following, and so on, still don’t see themselves as successful.
I think at this point it’s pretty clear that I am not successful as a musician; my releases do not pay for themselves, much less generating any considerable amount of income, it’s been a struggle to get even 150 subscribers on my YouTube channel, and even getting anyone to listen to my music to begin with is a struggle.
So, here are some ideas of what I think it would mean to be successful as a musician. This isn’t all-inclusive, nor does every criterion have to be met.
Hello my lovelies! December 6 is the last Bandcamp Friday of the year. On this day, Bandcamp waives their share of the sale price, leaving musicians with a bit more money from their hard work.
I of course have my latest album, Transitions, and quite a few other albums available, including with a deep discount if you opt to buy my entire discography all at once.
There are also a lot of other artists that I think you should consider supporting!
Hey there! I have a shiny new website, as you can probably see right here.
It’s still a bit of a work in progress. There’s a lot of meta-information I still need to add, and the music section will eventually get a nice tag browser to make it easier to filter through my, uh, 25 years of releases to find what you’re looking for, but adding in the data that’s necessary for that to happen will take some time.