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.

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!

TooLost (my previous top recommendation) has gotten incredibly difficult to deal with when it comes to copyright-related things. They now have a hair trigger for deciding that a song “needs documentation” regarding its legality, but won’t provide any useful information about what they think the problem is. On my most recent track they seem to think that it violates someone’s copyright but they won’t tell me whose, and apparently they’re putting the burden on me to just plain guess what their issue is, while taking a week to get back to me on every single question.

The best advice I’ve gotten from anyone is to spend a crapton more money on a copyright registration service with the hopes that it’ll convince them that I own the copyright to my own words, and even then there’s still the chance that it won’t actually help anything.

Then, for individual tracks that required licensing, I was recommending Soundrop, but they’ve raised their price and their cut, and apparently have similar support issues today.

The other distributors are just as bad. And the streaming environment is also bad.

In the past year I’ve made approximately $5 on streaming services. $5. Total. For a whole year’s worth of music.

Why should I continue to pay into a broken system that isn’t going to serve me?

Y'all can find my music on Bandcamp and Mirlo and (eventually) Subvert. And my current stuff will stay up on streaming as long as TooLost decides not to take it down after I stop paying, but I’m not going to go out of my way to put more stuff up through them.

Fuck streaming.

There are better ways.

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.

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.

Here are some comparisons between the original digital version, the first cut, and the recut. These were recorded on my TEAC TN-300 turntable using its built-in preamp and a Behringer UCA202 USB audio interface. All versions' levels have been normalized to the same LUFS target, but they are otherwise unprocessed. Also, the pitch is slightly higher on the turntable, which is likely a sign that I need to adjust it (or perhaps elasticStage’s lathes are running slightly slow) UPDATE: I just checked, my turntable is indeed running slightly fast.

Anyway, if you’re interested in buying physical copies of these albums, you can get them from my elasticStage page.

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!

The albums come in a very nice, professional-quality slipcover, with a custom-printed dust sleeve. The print quality is fantastic, and it easily meets or exceeds what I’d expect from traditional vinyl manufacturing.

The records themselves are lathe-cut, and according to elasticStage the blanks are manufactured with a process which are much more environmentally-friendly than traditional vinyl although they do not specify what exactly it is (although some sources say it’s PET, the plastic used for drink bottles).

The labels on the records feel a little chintzy, though. The label for Transitions was slightly off-center (unfortunate, given the circle motif) and both of them very much have a feeling of being printed on an inkjet printer, with a finish akin to early-2000s CD label makers. The print quality isn’t quite as crisp as I’d like. It’s still quite good, though, it just doesn’t feel quite so professional there.

Sound quality is, of course, the really important thing here.

First off, I should mention that while Transitions was properly mastered to modern standards (-14dB LUFS integrated with a -1dB true peak and with EQ matched to a reference curve), Refactor just got a “make things sound properly loud and consistent” approach where I did it all by ear, and spec-wise Refactor’s LUFS are all over the place and with some tracks having a true peak approaching +2dB. So I was super curious how well they’d turn out.

Both of them came out pretty great! They’re not perfect by any means, but the equalization on Transitions matched my expectations. Refactor was a bit treble-heavy, and there were a couple of bits where the high peaks sounded like they might have been hard-limited a little. This was especially prominent on Little Bouncing Ball, and the mp3 version streamed via Plex to the same hifi setup didn’t have the same characteristics.

I would be super interested to know how much better Refactor could sound if I gave it a remastering pass, but as it is, the current vinyl version sounds quite good! It also does sound characteristically like vinyl, so I don’t hate it by any means.

The big downside is that both albums do exhibit a lot of surface noise, and that surface noise actually sounds a lot like some sort of digital noise floor issue, which makes me wonder about the signal chain in their lathe setup. I had cleaned both records and my stylus and it made no difference to the surface noise, so I can only guess that it’s probably due to how the lathe cutting works.

But anyway, Transitions still made my tears well up at the places it normally does, and something about the string arrangements just felt richer and more emotional to me. And the surface noise gave both records something of a vintage feeling to them, even though the noise itself didn’t sound like typical vinyl noise.

So, with all that said, I produced the vinyl to be a collectible artifact, and not to have better audio quality. Given that both albums were produced entirely digitally and are available in lossless formats from Mirlo and Bandcamp, if you’re looking for the ultimate audio quality, buy them in FLAC. Personally I just use the high-bitrate MP3 versions.

But as an artifact, an indication that I was here and that I left my little mark on the world, I absolutely love that this service exists, and if anyone else feels the same, I have no qualms about offering these albums for sale through elasticStage.

(But if you just want to listen to them digitally, that’s fine too!)

I recently polled on Mastodon about next records to produce. The overwhelming response I got is that people would prefer that I make CDs instead. Fortunately, elasticStage makes those too! So, expect that to be a thing in the not-too-distant future.

I’ll still probably put more albums out on vinyl as well.

One I really want to do is Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, but unfortunately that will have to wait until elasticStage supports multi-disc sets, as 63 minutes is a bit too long for an LP. They do have multi-disc on their roadmap, although they’re not expecting it to be available until next year at the earliest.

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.

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.

Silos

In IndieWeb terminology, a “silo” is a website that operates basically in isolation from others, or where it’s a single site that is not under the control of its users, that attempts to be the single source of truth for everything. In social media parlance, this would be sites like Twitter X, Facebook, Tumblr, that sort of thing — a single dashboard that people sign into and can only see stuff from that site (or things posted directly to it), where the data is formatted based on that site’s requirements and are subject to that site’s moderation whims. Any interoperability with other sites is generally done through a special-cased partnership or API-based agreement.

Note that something being a “silo” isn’t a value judgement; it’s just a statement of the way in which the site or service operates.

In the music space, here are some of the better-known silos, which I present mostly as a point of reference when discussing the independent alternatives:

• Streaming providers, such as Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora, Amazon Music and so on:

  These are places where where you pay a monthly subscription fee (sometimes in the form of ad revenue) to get access to their libraries, and presumably some amount of this subscription cost goes to pay for the music that they host in some way (although the people receiving that music are usually not the musicians, but that’s a whole other rant).

  The streaming silos tend to get their content through partnership agreements with distributors such as DistroKid, TooLost, TuneCore, CDBaby, amuse, and many others. While distributors handle the annoying parts of submitting musicians' content to the streaming providers and managing the payments in return, these partnerships are still formed directly and not available to the general public, and they, too, are silos.

• Storefronts, such as Bandcamp, Mirlo, Gumroad, Ko-Fi Shops, itch, etc.:

  These serve as places where people can make their music available for sale, and sell it, often with other value-add tools such as mailing lists, blogs, merch stores, and so on.

  These are often silos out of necessity, as handling payments is actually super tricky for a whole bunch of legal and business reasons. However, none of them work as just payment providers, and instead they’re all all-in-one does-everything things, often with the expectation that a musician will use that site as their one and only place to actually make their music available for discovery.

  Mirlo is an interesting case in that it’s run using a co-op governance model and strives to be as fair and equitable to the musicians as possible, but it is still a silo. There is only one instance of Mirlo, you cannot subscribe to a musician on another site from Mirlo (or vice-versa), and if you want to sell stuff on Mirlo, you have to adapt it to the specific capabilities that Mirlo puts in place.

• Discography and discovery services, such as Last.fm, MusicBrainz/ListenBrainz:

  These sites attempt to catalog all known music and help people to discover more of it. Often this is through a combination of user submissions and through so-called “scrobbling” software, where someone installs a bit of software to track the music they’re listening to and provide it as structured data back to the site, usually with varying levels of fidelity.

  One of the intended purposes of all this is to find relationships between music, such as “these bands have these members in common,” or “this recording had this guest performer on it,” or also recommendations such as, “If you like this song, you’ll probably also like this song.”

• Media hosting sites, such as YouTube and SoundCloud:

  These sorts of sites are basically fancy file hosting, where people can upload a piece of media and then others can watch/listen to them, usually for free (via ad revenue), and there’s often discovery and recommendations as well.

• Licensing clearinghouses, such as Songtradr, PlusMusic, or the late great Magnatune:

  Music gets used in way more ways than simply being listened to on its own. It’s often used as background music for commercials, video games, films and TV shows, Twitch streams, YouTube videos, and so on. Licensing agencies allegedly help with the difficult parts of getting one’s music heard and getting those fat stacks of royalties. Allegedly.

• Livestreaming platforms, such as Twitch, Picarto, Floatplane, YouTube Live, etc.:

  Sometimes musicians like to perform live for an audience. These platforms provide that ability, as well as a modicum of discoverability based on popularity and stream content. However, they tend to be problematic for live music, due to rights-related issues, bogus copyright claims, and overly-aggressive copyright enforcement in general. They also tend to be ad-supported and the ad breaks are often not in exactly the best place when it comes to music.

Federated services

A so-called “federated” service is one where it’s designed such that there’s multiple instances of the software running independently, but there is interoperable communication between them, so that, for example, a person on instance A can subscribe to updates posted to instance B. Think of it as being like email, where someone with a gmail.com address can still send a message to someone on beesbuzz.biz and vice-versa; there’s no central authority on who is able to send what to whom, there is just an agreement in the form of an open protocol that allows anyone to join in, and no need to form a particular partnership for two things to talk to each other.

In the music space we have a number of things like this:

• Mastodon: This isn’t technically a music thing, but a lot of musicians are on it. Its basically a federated version of Twitter, where people can post about stuff they like or are listening to, or can share clips of what they’re working on, and it’s just basically a free-form discussion microblogging thing. Mastodon is often what people think of when they hear about ActivityPub, which is the main underlying protocol it uses for instances to talk to each other. There are also other things that speak the Mastodon protocol suite and interoperate with it, including Akkoma, GoToSocial, and a bunch of others. The collection of systems that interoperate in this way are generally referred to as “the Fediverse.”

• Funkwhale: This is basically an ActivityPub-based implementation of SoundCloud, more or less.

• PeerTube: And this is an ActivityPub YouTube-like.

• Bandwagon: This is a (currently early development) ActivityPub-based thing that’s essentially a federated version of Bandcamp or Mirlo. The overall goal for it is to have federated discovery and perhaps the ability to purchase in a cross-instance manner as well.

Self-hosted things

Self-hosting a music website is a bit of a challenge; while you certainly can use pretty much any website publishing platform for that (this site, for example, uses Publ¹, and many musicians use things like WordPress and the like), there’s only a handful of things that are tailor-made specifically for making self-hosted music sites.

• Faircamp is a static site generator that is geared specifically towards allowing people to have a one-and-done thing for encoding all your files, generating nice HTML, and providing an interlinked discography, on any website that allows for static hosting. It also has a mechanism for “soft” payment gateways, where you can set up an external payment provider in order to sell a hidden link to a .zip download. It’s quite nice if your needs are specifically what Faircamp was designed for (which is basically a self-hosted Bandcamp analog).

• Bandcrash is a tool meant to encode albums and generate standalone HTML players that can then be embedded on another website. I wrote this specifically to make it easier to publish albums to my itch.io page, although I also use it in places on this site (such as the client work section), and at some point I will switch to using it for the embedded player on all of my album pages (I just need to get around to supporting a couple of things first).

• Blamscamp and Scritch are, similarly, player embed generators, although they require you to do your own audio encoding.

  Bandcrash originally used Blamscamp as its player, incidentally, and at one point I was considering switching to Scritch before I ended up just writing my own, Camptown. I do intend to eventually make Blamscamp and Scritch options for the player for those who prefer it, though.

• Owncast: This is an ActivityPub-enabled live streaming platform. It’s what I use for my own streaming setup.

  I list this as being “self-hosted” rather than “federated” because it isn’t really federated in the general sense. An instance can only host a single stream at a time and there’s no real login (aside from chat names), but you can subscribe to stream notifications via pretty much any Fediverse account, there’s a limited amount of chat identity management using IndieAuth, and there’s plenty of bots which will happily share stream discovery events to the greater Fediverse. It’s a publish-only sort of federation, similar to providing an RSS/Atom feed on a blog.

• Plex and PlexAmp: Self-hosted music streaming (á la Spotify/Pandora/Apple Music/etc.).

  This is a bit different than the other things here in terms of it being for simplifying your own consumption of music, rather than publishing it, but it’s an important part of the ecosystem in this modern, connected era. If you buy your music from people instead of just renting it, this is a perfectly good way to get access to it everywhere. It also has a discovery and recommendation mechanism, although that part is a paid add-on to Plex itself and my understanding is it only helps to recommend things you already own for having a semi-curated continuous music listening experience.

Protocols

The goal of interoperability is to make it so that musicians don’t have to redo work in a lot of places. Right now, when a musician wants to release some music, they have to upload it to a bunch of different places: music distributors, social media, every site they want to sell it on, and so on. This is a lot of work, and it gets increased every time someone needs to make a change to something (such as correcting a typo in the lyrics).

In my dream scenario, I’d be able to just post an album once to a site I control (be it this one or something like Bandcamp or Mirlo), and then have it picked up by all of the other places I want my music to appear.

One of the most important things about interoperability is having a protocol through which things can interoperate.

Most of the things listed above use ActivityPub with various ad-hoc data standards for the actual data exchange.

Another approach to interop is adopting composable protocols such as RSS/Atom and mf2 (preferred by the IndieWeb community) to provide the data in ways that can be parsed by external tooling. Any piece of software that publishes music to the web should also provide some common format that can be discovered from the page and then used to provide the data in a more computer-digestible way.

On this site I have attempted to provide some amount of mf2 and atom data; for example, the main page provides a feed of albums and blog posts in mf2 (which you can parse using pin13.net), and each of my album and track pages try to provide structured information about their content as well (for example, you can see the structured data for Transitions and for Behind a Mask). And of course for subscribing to updates you can point a feed reader at pretty much any page on this site.

There is no current widely-agreed-to standard for music interchange, however; I’ve been working with the developer of Bandwagon to try to establish some common ground (which I will attempt to support both on this site and in Camptown).

There do exist some protocols already, such as schema.org’s CreativeWork types, and OpenGraph’s “Music” namespace. These protocols are not widely-supported either, and leave a lot to be desired, as they are designed in the interest of search engines and social media companies, not so much individual creators.

What’s the point, anyway?

Imagine a world where you can post a release to your website and have it show up on social media, in discovery and recommendation feeds, or on genre-specific streaming radio stations that actively promote the artists (given appropriate permissions, of course), or any number of other things I haven’t imagined just yet.

And with a little more work in terms of payment- and license-related information, imagine being able to have things like automated sync licensing for placements in video games and short films and podcasts.

And imagine being in complete control of how your stuff is presented to the world to begin with! Even if you don’t want to build your own website from the ground up, imagine being able to choose your favorite existing software and use that to run your web presence, and if you don’t like something about it, being able to switch to something else without having to redo everything from scratch!

This website is the fourth time I’ve completely rebuilt my web presence from the ground up, and I hope that it can be the last.

1. Someday I will release my Publ templates for this site so that others may use Publ for their music sites as well. I’d like to think this site is pretty good! ↩