Today was the second day of VRelium Enchanted, which I performed at and had a really good time. I’m going to talk a bit about how VRChat performances work and some thoughts about my most recent one, in particular.
UPDATE: This is obsolete! It might still be useful for some folks (especially those working on a budget or trying to get ideas of how to cobble someting together), but my current setup is completely different and much easier to work with.
Quite some time ago I posted my recommendations for streaming distributors but things have all changed in a very bad way since then.
People sometimes ask me how they can start making music, or how they can get better at making music when they’ve hit a wall.
A thing that has worked for me quite a lot over the years is participating in Song Fight!, an online songwriting competition that’s been going for a bit over 25 years now. It’s an incredibly low-stakes yet highly-satisfying way of learning how to make music and how to hone your craft.
It also really could use more new people participating!
As an artist I have my music on Spotify, because I feel like I cannot choose not to.
However, I would ask listeners to please listen to my music literally anywhere else.
Update: Jeremy Blake has made a very good video on this topic. I recommend that you watch it.
Another update: I have now removed my music from Spotify, and most other streaming platforms as a consequence.
As I talked about previously, there are many different services for getting your music online with the major streaming providers. Here’s my thoughts on a few that I’ve worked with, and a couple that are on my radar and I plan on trying out in the future.
Of course, the best place to sell your music is on places like Mirlo and Bandcamp, where you actually get paid well for things and your buyers are able to retain access to your music in exchange, but the unfortunate reality of music in the current era is that most listeners are going to the streamers to listen to stuff, so if you want your stuff to be listened to, this is where you have to put it.
I’ve been looking into physical releases again lately. After my recent vinyl releases, my various polls have found that people are much more interested in buying things on CD than vinyl, because they’re a much easier means of doing a physical collection.
The manufacturing space used to be a lot bigger, but these days there’s not a whole lot of options. For most musicians, there are two paths to go down: on-demand and short-run.
After my previous review of elasticStage, a customer service representative reached out to me and told me that they’d improved their cutting process to reduce the surface noise, and asked if I’d be interested in receiving (at no charge) a recut of the two records. I agreed to this, and the replacement records arrived today.
On both of my albums, I am extremely pleased to report that the audio quality has improved in every possible way! The surface noise is essentially gone, and everything sounds perfectly clean. Some of the subtler sounds that had been lost behind the surface noise before are now super apparent, too.
The difference is much more profound on Transitions than on Refactor, but both albums have definitely improved as a result of their process change.
The actual manufacturing and delivery time was also greatly reduced from the last time, which tells me that they’ve probably cleared a backlog in their manufacturing.
10 years ago to this day, on my 37th birthday, I released Refactor, which I still consider to be my definitive album.
You can still access its old microsite. (Be sure to click the “play” button in the corner.)
Happy birthday!
Furality is an annual virtual furry conference that takes place entirely in VRChat. I have a dealer’s den booth this year, booth 816 (second level of the 2D Art + Miscellaneous) section, and I’m super excited!
Last night Furality opened up a dealer’s den preview so that we could check that our booths are set up correctly, and as a treat we got to see a decent chunk of the world and the overall style of the show, and I gotta say, it’s incredible. The Furality team have knocked it out of the park this year, and have really outdone themselves. From what I’ve seen this isn’t just going to be an incredible con, it’s going to be an amazing VRChat experience, and I am absolutely thrilled to be a part of it.
If you’re at all in VRChat (even if you aren’t at all interested in furry stuff), or heck, even if you’ve been thinking of trying VRChat out, I highly recommend coming to Furality Somna so that you can experience the joy. Also, you don’t need a VR setup to use VRChat! it just helps with the immersion (although just a warning, if you play it on desktop or cellphone you’ll probably end up really wanting to get a headset anyway).
Also, I plan on doing various impromptu shows at various places throughout the con, and if you see me wandering around, feel free to come up and say “hi!”
Back in April I learned about elasticStage, an on-demand vinyl production company that makes it easy for musicians to get their music on vinyl without any up-front costs. I ended up setting up Transitions and Refactor for manufacturing, and ordered some test copies.
My lead time at the time was around 6 weeks, and I was told the records would ship on May 14. They ended up shipping a couple days later than expected, but I still ended up receiving them today, which isn’t too much further after the original estimate.
Anyway, here’s my review of how the product turned out.
UPDATE: elasticStage have responded to my review by sending me updated copies. Definitely check out what’s new!
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.
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:
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:
And I may have another concert happening in June as well! Watch this space! (or better yet, my show calendar)
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:
Open up your album’s editor
Open up your browser’s Javascript console (usually using ctrl-alt-I on a PC, or cmd-alt-I on a Mac)
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'))})
Verify that the prices are the way you want them and then click “update album”
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.