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!

The show

As usual I performed from a VR space using my avatar¹, which was a first for them. Unfortunately my hand tracking setup wasn’t working (you can read about those woes over on my main blog) but I don’t think it really mattered. I also finally got to make use of my new audio setup for an actual show (having done a couple of dry runs in VRChat over the past week) and I got a lot praise for the audio quality, so that was super nice to hear.

I played acoustic versions of Come Out, Behind a Mask, and Adding Up to Nothing, and all three songs went over really well. I also took a recording which I’ll be posting on my performances section at some point, and it will also appear on their own performance archive.

Afterwards they invited me to stick around for their status meeting so I could hear about a lot of the amazing work they’re doing. Back when I was a software engineer I’d actually considered applying for a job with them, and this whole thing has me thinking I’d like to do that again! Even though I’m too disabled to work a full-time job anymore. And super burned out on software engineering. 🙃 But Mark Graham, the director of the Wayback Machine, said that they take all kinds, so maybe there would be something there for me anyway. I’ll have to look at their open job listings.

Preservation

Anyway. I definitely want to share some thoughts about the Internet Archive. I am super glad that it exists and that they specifically operate like a library, not like a tech company, because it’s such an amazing resource for everyone out there, especially when it comes to preserving open-license and public-domain content, as well as abandoned/lost media.

A while back I started to write an AI-driven lyric search engine so that I could find a song that I’d had stuck in my head and couldn’t remember the name of. Eventually I used my human brain, and not AI, to remember enough context cues to track it down; the song was “Lolita” by Moneyshot, off their debut album Bliss. This music is, as far as I can tell, completely lost to the world, as is everything about that band.

But fortunately, I could remember enough things about the album to track things down; I had bought this album from CDBaby back when they were an online record store and not just one of many cogs in a corrupt machine, and CDBaby’s record store had a very specific and easy-to-remember URL scheme (which feels like a luxury today). So with just a little more work I was able to find the original listing page and from there I was able to get the band’s website². All thanks to the Internet Archive.

I’ve also been trying to recover a bunch of lost media as well. For example, back in grad school, a friend of mine was releasing weird abstract electronic music on hand-burned CD-Rs. There is absolutely no information about him or his music anywhere online as far as I can find. So I took action³. I also intend to take such action on so many other CDs that I own which are impossible to find online, this lost media from a time when music meant something.

Internet Archive also reminded me of a band I loved back in college, and how their sound has evolved over the years was a direct inspiration to the final track on Transitions, as well as much of the sound of that album⁴.

My personal efforts

Most of my websites run on my own platform, Publ, that I designed specifically to make sure that it’s as archival-friendly as possible. Pagination is stable, nearly everything is done with server-side rendering, and image renditions⁵ are generated in a cache-friendly way, ensuring that the right rendition is served up based on whatever render spec was provided at the time the page was served up.

There’s also a helper tool I wrote, Pushl, which helps to maintain links between sites, particularly with protocols like Webmention, but another thing it can do is automatically ping the Wayback Machine with every webpage it sees, ensuring that things get archived if possible. Because the web is nothing if it cannot be preserved and cached and stored for later and remain open.

My website is also built such that the Internet Archive can find and preserve the public previews of my music. I use another tool I wrote, Bandcrash, to generate the preview players, and have some glue to import Bandcrash’s output everywhere on this site. So in theory, when the Wayback Machine next crawls this website⁶, everything will be preserved for later, including the player, which is also built to be IA-crawlable.

I am also working on an idea for an indie-friendly streaming system — think RSS but for Spotify-like purposes — and I have prototypical microformats throughout my website to facilitate this, as well as a design for an overarching music/streaming syndication format that makes use of these microformats, as well as providing an easier-to-parse JSON rendition. (There are technical reasons why I’m not simply extending RSS for this purpose.)

I also intend, at some point, to upload my entire discography to the Internet Archive, because as I’ve said before, my main interest is in gaining listeners and people who are willing to support me in ways other than going through the war machine, and I care more about my stuff being heard and preserved than I do about it making me a millionaire. I have enough money to live on (thanks to my aforementioned past as a software engineer), what I need is the satisfaction of feeling successful, and also I need to know that my music will outlast me and my frail, fleshy self.

In conclusion

The Internet Archive is amazing, and we should all do what we can to support it, for the good of the future.

1. Specifically a version where I’ve added clothing, which will be coming as a free update sometime soon. ↩

2. Unfortunately, this is about all the information I can find out about them. Like many early-2000s indie bands they went out of their way to be super mysterious so I don’t know if any of the members (if there even are multiple members — I’m far from the first to be this kind of totally-a-real-band-I-swear artist!) went on to keep making music under other names. ↩

3. Unfortunately the name he released under has Not Aged Well, and also the music is… well, it’s very much of its time. I love “Praying Mantis” though, or at least the way he performed it live. ↩

4. Although most of the sonic inspiration comes from Miracles of Modern Science, an incredible band that you should check out. ↩

5. Incidentally, one of my roles as a software engineer was to write the scaler and design the next-generation image rendering service for an online-bookstore-turned-ecommerce-giant, and a previous role there was to work on their automatic scanned-book-to-ebook-conversion effort for the first majorly-successful ebook platform out there. The fact that Internet Archive has been doing similar things but in a much more open-culture and preservationist way makes me very happy. ↩

6. And writing this post reminded me that I needed to re-ping the crawler for everything, since the last crawl was from before I switched to the Bandcrash embeds from Bandcamp, which is not IA-friendly! ↩

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.

Recommended: TooLost

TooLost is my current primary distributor for the major streaming services. Their upload process is pretty okay (not perfect, but not the worst either), they have support that are reasonably responsive, and they cost only $20/year for unlimited uploads with full royalties going to the artist. They also support a huge number of streaming providers and marketplaces, including the ones that people actually use.

They also provide content ID management with a good level of granularity (for example, you can whitelist various YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channels to allow them to use your music without restriction), and they have a bunch of addons for analytics tracking.

It would be nice if they had better bulk-editing features for the music uploader, and if their catalog importer actually worked reasonably well (I do not recommend trying to use it if you’re migrating to them since it ends up being more work than just reuploading your tracks directly), and I’ve had some difficulty with my YouTube channel mapping (which doesn’t really matter all that much), but generally-speaking they’ve been great to work with.

They also provide mechanical licensing for cover songs, but currently charge $15/track (as a one-time fee). This is perfectly reasonable, but not the best deal around.

They also include a simple “find this release” page for free (and you can customize the URL!), and it works well enough, although sometimes the links break and you have to pester them to fix it.

As far as I am aware, they are unique in being an affordable distributor that also lets you specify your own release label without paying a bunch extra for a label account.

On my radar: Soundrop

I have’t worked with Soundrop yet but I’ve heard good things about them. They charge only $1/track per upload with no annual fee, and instead take a royalty cut from the streaming services. This makes them less of a good deal than TooLost if you’re uploading a lot of albums or singles per year, and it also means you aren’t maximizing your revenue, but for another $1/track they will also provide mechanical licensing for cover songs and administer your royalty splits, making them an extremely good deal if you do a lot of covers. You won’t make as much money on a popular cover as you would doing it yourself or through TooLost, but you also won’t get sued for messing something up. Probably.

Less good: CDBaby

CDBaby is pretty much the original indie distributor for the streaming services. A lot of why they have so much cachet is due to them being around the longest. One of my albums is still handled by them because I can’t be bothered to move it elsewhere.

The plus side to them is that they only charge a one-time fee for distributing your album, and then maintenance comes in the form of a 10% royalty cut.

The minus side is that one-time fee is $10 per release (which isn’t awful for albums, but is enormous for singles).

It’s a lot better than it used to be, though; back when they were the only choice it was something like $75/album and a 30% cut, and I think they only changed it very recently. They also charge money for a “find this release” page, and the amount they charge is enormous for what amounts to a single non-customizable static webpage. No thank you.

I ended up moving the two released-as-Sockpuppet CDBaby releases to TooLost mostly to simplify my album management and that process was also a bit annoying, especially since they ended up taking down the TooLost versions of those albums when they did so and that was a giant mess to sort out.

Probably avoid: Amuse

Amuse made their way by being a free distributor that used artist success as a sort of A&R thing. I did a couple releases through them. The process was abysmal, and accessing any information required running a goddamn mobile app for some reason.

They are no longer free, and they’re still very app-focused. I don’t see any reason to go with them over any of the above choices.

Probably avoid: DistroKid

I was pretty loyal to DistroKid for many years, but I switched from them to TooLost last year because of a number of issues.

• Their cover licensing is incredibly expensive and requires ongoing maintenance fees
• Their ContentID is incredibly expensive, requires ongoing maintenance fees, and doesn’t allow fine-grained whitelisting
• When Spotify notifies them of algorithmic streaming (legitimately or not) they will just outright remove your music from the services with no real recourse
• They have been accused of union-busting and being bad to their support team
• Their support has definitely gone way downhill in recent years
• The uploader interface is pretty terrible

If you are fine with all those things, their price is pretty good, although not as good as TooLost. Like TooLost they provide a “find this release” page for free, although you can’t customize the URL at all.

Probably avoid: Tunecore

TuneCore was the first real alternative to CDBaby, and when they came around they were very much not good. They were extremely expensive (something like $100 per album per year) and I don’t even remember why I was convinced to try them out for a year. I think it’s because they were the first distributor which didn’t take a royalty cut? Not that it mattered, because I made something like $2 in royalties on that album. Then when I asked to take my album down instead of spending another $100 they got weird about trying to retain me as a customer even though that release was now $98 in the hole. So I have a lot of lasting resentment because of that.

Nowadays they charge much more reasonable rates, starting at $23/year (which is decently competitive, although doens’t include all the features that TooLost does at that price point). Getting all of TooLost’s features requires paying twice as much.

My album Transitions (and its companion Deadnames) are perhaps the most obviously on-the-nose trans-related albums of mine, but it’s woven into the DNA of so much of my music. The songs All Tan, Adding Up to Nothing, Hypnagogic, Material Change, and Fool in the Middle are all quite specifically about gender feels, but being trans has informed everything about my life and my existence.

Here are some other lesser-known trans musicians of note (in no particular order):

• Bedussey, self-described as “bedroom pop-punk”
• elizabeth veldon, a noise/drone artist
• ella guro makes ridiculously awesome abstract chiptune soundscapes
• Jennifer Vena Wood goes more for affirmational acoustic folksy stuff which feels super underrepresented in trans music these days and I’m 100% here for it
• Kookie sings a bunch of songs about being trans, and about being a Linux user, two things which are super entwined in my experience
• Left at London does a super interesting fusion of classic and modern forms
• Patricia Taxxon does incredible weird experimental music
• Ratwyfe makes fun songs about all sorts of things; definitely check out cryptid (mothman) which is super relatable
• Trust Fund Ozu makes some amazingly lush musical textures in what feels like an amazing balance between rock and hyperpop

There are of course many, many more out there; I put out a call for recommendations and was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of trans artists I was pointed to! It was super difficult to pick just a few to showcase here, and it would be a disservice to let them go without further mention. Thank you so much to everyone who shared their own picks.

Also, please check out the Seattle Trans and Nonbinary Choral Ensemble, a choir I am extremely proud to be a part of.

You can also use recordings of things other than acoustic spaces for interesting effects; Logic’s Space Designer comes with a whole bunch of impulse responses that are used for various effects, including drum transformers, ghost rhythms, and other such things. A lot of my more sound designy stuff makes heavy use of this.

But what if you use whole songs as an impulse response?

Here’s some results I got while messing around with it just now:

The way I did these in logic:

1. Create an audio track with the source audio
2. Add a Space Designer plugin, and drag the convolution audio onto it
3. Set the “dry” level to Mute, and the “wet” level to 0
4. Create an empty instrument track, and make an empty region that’s roughly the length of the convolution audio that starts at the end of your source audio (to give it a proper reverb tail)
5. Apply the Mastering Assistant
6. Bounce!

This seems like a really good framework for experimentation, especially for drone tones and ambient soundscapes. I’d be super interested to see what other people come up with!