Jay Peach Productions

Well, lets try this again, as my previous post seems to have been wiped out when the phone went kaput.

Been working on producing a new album, with about 15-20 songs in various stages of completion. Some need mixing, some don’t feel complete. And the producer/engineer hats I wear to finish things up keep on being interrupted by new musical ideas. So I need to apply myself to finishing the album up.

I’ve been recommending Qobuz as a source for music rather than Apple Music and especially Spotify, which I call Shittify, as Daniel Ek’s terrorist company never stops finding ways to not compensate artists. Proudly, the recommendation seems to have worked, albeit slowly, as my Shittify streams are almost at zero, and Qobuz reports some serious plays, to the tune of a combined 4 month total of about $175. Yeah, they finally got around to reporting sales which took place in December 2025, which ain’t a good sign. But that’s still better than Facebook’s 9 month delay in reporting their measly $.0000002 payout per song.

Best of all, Qobuz pays a heafy $.01728+ per stream, at least according to March 2026 numbers. This is in line with numbers reported by YouTube Red and better than Amazon’s $.013+ payout, and Apple’s measly .00427+. Best thing about Apple and Amazon is that you can actually buy a track rather than stream it, and I get a pretty decent payout from Apple of $.49 for a $.69 song. So if you find a tune that you really like, buying the song is a great way to reward the artist.

I love getting screwed over by my phone which won’t even accept a charge, despite being connected to a charger for better than 3 hours. The charge icon showed 12% charge in the beginning, and the phone just shut down with 1% showing just now. Heat related? as it’s over 100F with pretty disgusting humidity.

Here are some of my latest creations, photo taken at night with not the greatest light quality. I need to shoot these pictures in the daylight, as acrylic paints tend to darken as they dry, and I haven’t gotten the hang of the right amount of lightness to counteract that tendency.

Soundcloud displays the general industry trend of enshittification. Back years ago, Soundcloud was one of the places where non-name artists and music hobbyists could display their wares. Later, Soundcloud came up with the idea that they could extract money from the artists that create their product. The idea was, you (the artist) pay us to store your music, and in turn, we’ll promote your music to our subscribers. We’ll also allow you unlimited upload space. And we’ll monetize your plays.

Well, in the beginning that worked. Music I uploaded 6 years ago would get an immediate spike of 300-500 plays. But soon, that number started to drop until the play spike was less than 100 plays. And there was a payola scheme in there because as soon as I terminated my Artist Pro account because they never paid me a dime for my monetized songs and plays were getting less and less, plays got even lower.

Now, I don’t even advertise that Soundcloud is a platform with my music, same as Shittify, the champion of enshittification.

But still no releases. Lately, as in the past few months,the musical urges have solely directed towards creating music, either whole tunes, or pieces I might be able to put together into a song.

Gotta go back into the vault of at least the pat several months to see if there’s enough material for an album. Unlike in the past, releasing singles doesn’t seem to be the way it’s done in the platforms I’m releasing to now. Platforms like Mirlo.space and jam.coop.

So until I can put on my producer and engineer hats on, they’ll be no progress.

I ‘ve been on it a while, and sometimes there’s an interesting exchange. Here’s the site: https://the.socialmusic.network/. It’s a relatively new site and it started out slow, but the subscribers have made it a place that I check out a couple of times a month. There’s a fairly large European component, if that means anything, so not a US bias, for sure.

Here’s a mostly finished painting that I previewed as a work in progress a while back. Still trying to get used to working in acrylic paint, as my preferred medium is oil paint.

Anyway, here it is:

The photo here is taken at night under incandescent lighting. The colors seem to be realistic and the glare is sort of useful, as it shows the characteristic shine of acrylic. The painting is approximately 16×20 inches, metric of course, since the canvas on cardboard is from Temu, although from a stateside shipper.

I also paint on real canvas, mostly on commission, as expenses are higher.

More paintings and other work forthcoming.