Hi! The title of this is a bit spooky, but not for Patreon stuff. Let me explain...
I've been releasing music digitally on streaming services for almost 15 years now. Initially through CDBaby and mostly through DistroKid. Generally, it's a pretty pleasant experience and always a bit of a joy to see my creations on major platforms.
Getting paid for this has always been a nice bonus for me, but never the goal. In the 11 years I've used DistroKid, I've earned a grand total of $2880. Good pocket change, but it's not gonna pay the mortgage.
But the course of digital streaming has shifted the past few years, especially with the major services like Spotify. The goalposts for getting paid through these services continue to get moved further out. Which, ultimately, didn't bother me much since making money through that was never my goal.
However, in the recent months there have been more talks about how major streaming services (Spotify specifically) are ingesting their libraries into generative language model systems in order to generate new, or "remixed", music that they then don't have to pay or attribute anyone for and I'm just exhausted by all this.
So what does this mean?
I'm still trying to figure that part out. Right now, I'm thinking that Season 25 of the Two Hour Track Challenge will be my final streaming release. There's a lot of symmetry with the biggest project I undertook also capping off my library of streaming music.
Lots of plans are in place to continue writing music and doing other things, but with more limited releases. Likely to just Patreon and Bandcamp for the foreseeable future.
It's entirely possible that I change my mind, or feel like it's more important to work "for exposure" than go completely underground, but right now I'm just fed up with the whole system and I want out.
OK, rant over.
April...
April was a good month. Mostly, I was extremely focused on finishing up Quiet Spaces, Volume 5, which I'm very happy with! It's available exclusively to subscribers in the shared drive if you haven't listened yet.
A handful of other songs made their way out onto the drive too!
Second Chances - This was as my submission for the Two Hour Album Challenge at the start of the month. The theme was Soft // Rebirth, which was fun to figure out. I do like the jazzy vibes of this and think it'll fit very well in an album some day.
Shoegaze Miasma - Definitely not the final name for this song, but I couldn't think of anything else to call it for now. I actually have some nice lyrics for it that I started, but wanted to get this song out to you before I figured all that out.
PHAT OST Missile Storm - Still working on this project! I feel this track has so much of that electronic industrial vibe that 90s and early 00s video games had. Really happy how this one came together and it was a ton of fun to work with a real guitarist to jam out the rhythms and riffs.
Pocket Playground OST Lobby - The dev wanted an alternate version of the main menu song from last month for the lobby. Ultimately, I think we are going with a different song, but I do like the groove this one has.
Plans for May
With Quiet Spaces out of the way, I'm getting back to focus on commissions. I have about 7 or 8 songs that I need to jam out in the next few months so my goal is to alternate between doing a commissioned song and then a personal song for fun so I don't burn out again.
Not much in the way of collaborations and game dev though, now that it's nice out I'm probably going to spend my remaining free time doing construction projects around the house. Excited to get outside and get blasted by allergies. 😎
Thank you!
I appreciate your support, especially through these difficult times. I feel like I'm slowly getting my brain back from the past few months and I can start doing things that I want to do again.
Hope you have a great month! Looking forward to seeing what we make. Off to donate to some cats 🐈
-b