Sockpuppet.

VRelium Enchanted 2025

I performed at VRelium’s charity show, “Enchanted,” a weekend-long music festival on September 6 and 7 in VRChat in support of the ALS Associationon! Please enjoy the recording.

Please do not ask me about streaming distribution

Quite some time ago I posted my recommendations for streaming distributors but things have all changed in a very bad way since then.

Song Fight! Live! Five and Twenty

Song Fight!’s annual show took place in Seattle, WA at Jellyfish Brewing Georgetown (917 South Nebraska Street) on August 8 and 9. More information can be found on the forum thread.

Song Fight!: The how, the what, and the why

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!

On Spotify, and listening to and collecting music

As a musician, I am often asked where people can listen to my music, and people express confusion about why my music isn’t on Spotify (aside from The War Machine, which is about why my music isn’t on Spotify).

I wrote this as an explanation of why I don’t support Spotify and why I ask listeners to return to buying and collecting music or, at the very least, moving to other streaming services.

Also, see Jeremy Blake’s very good video on this topic.

tl;dr summary: If you are able to, buy your music, ideally from Mirlo or Bandcamp. If you are going to pay to stream, use Qobuz or Tidal, and if you want to stream for free (and I totally get it! times are tough!), use YouTube Music or Pandora.

Some recommendations for digital distribution

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.

RFFF ‘25 show

Radio Free Fedi hosted a series of summer concerts, and I’m thrilled to have performed a set on July 6, broadcast from VRChat.

You can read more about the festival on the NHAM blog.

CD and vinyl manufacturing options

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.

elasticStage update

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.

VRelium: Horizons: Music Beyond the Universe

I performed at VRelium for Horizons: Music Beyond the Universe, on what happened to be my birthday!