Been doing music for a while. Like making ambient, EDM, Funk and Electronic music; listen to just about everything for inspiration. Fell in love with synthesizsers back around 1980, before that, organ and piano. I also play guitar badly, and dabble with violin and flute. May try to incorporate those into my songs, if there’s an interest.
By the way, my music is mostly instrumental, so you don’t need to know English to enjoy it.
I finally got around to hooking up the RCA plugs which are the only output jacks on the Clavinova CVP-50. Next step was to connect it up to the Zoom H8 portable digital recorder to see if the RCA plugs were connected to the right connectors on the Clavinova. At this point, the recorder was showing signal from the Clavinova when I started the Clavinova to play some music.
So I turned on the recorder to record something and it worked! I think the recorder to connected up AUX jacks on the Clavinova, though I don’t know whether I’ve got the right and left jacks connected up correctly, because there is a difference in the signals from the Clavinova. Gotta find a mirror to look at the connectors on the Clavinova because what I’m using as a reference is the French section of the user’s manual and the section with a description of the connectors is quite small and not detailed enough.
For new viewers, here’s a site you might want to visit: https://linktr.ee/jaypeach53. It’s got links to my music and other sites that might be of interest.
Well, I got back on InstaGram in a very limited way. I’m using IG to post promotions of my music as the Apple Music promotions seem to get 30-40 clicks a month. Not much, but apparently IG has stopped shadowbanning me, at least for some content, as 30% of views I get are from non-followers. Still facing the reality that IG deals in sex discrimination, as 80% of my viewers are male.
Another bothersome reality is that IG stories are not getting any views. As of today, I’ve posted 44 pieces of content to IG (mostly stories) and only 14 of them got any views.
I keep reading that the way to make money off the music biz nowadays is to put your music on platforms like Mirlo and BandCamp to get fans to purchase your music instead of streaming your music from some DSP for hundreds and hundreds less money. Admittedly, this makes sense other than the market for platforms like Mirlo and BandCamp is minimal compared to the DSPs. After all, I’ve been on BandCamp for almost 5 years and have plays totaling less than one days plays on 5-6 DSPs.
I have gotten to the point that most nights, after it has cooled off, I wipe down the Clavinova, and set it up to do a set of rhythms and then riff to those rhythms. It’s been so much fun to do that I’ve neglected to do the music making that’ll result in an album I’m trying to put together for the https:// Mirlo.space web site, mainly to see if I can make some money off of Mirlo.
And another thing about the Clavinova that I may not have mentioned before is that it not only has, I think, 31 rhythms in its repertoire, but each of those rhythms has a variation that you can switch back and forth between. What a find! I don’t think the Casio CGP-700 that I paid hundreds for is as much fun to experiment with. Admittedly, I bought the Casio 10 years ago, when I first started playing keyboards after a decades-long hiatus, and the experience I’ve acquired is greatly enhancing the enjoyment I get from playing an instrument.
Spotify is one of the least honest companies on the planet, adding is not in their genes. On June 21, they report 32 monthly listeners, but if you add up the listeners in cities, you get 47 listeners. Huh? See the evidence. The count they get is from the country list, which is obviously undercounting the actual listeners.
Just as one example, from the country list, the US has 17 monthly listeners, but the city list counts 32 monthly listeners.
So, do figures lie? Or do liars figure, you tell me.
Update: on June 29, Spotify reports 29 monthly listeners, but if you add up the count of listeners per city, you get 45 listeners. And I’m supposed to believe their reporting of streaming plays? I don’t think so. Spotify can’t even do basic math, while Danny Ek is funding AI.military companies.
Of course, these numbers are all suspect, as before Spotify stopped paying artists unless you got 1,000 streams per year on a song, I had approximately 2500 monthly listeners and a reasonable distribution of sources of those plays. Then, all of a sudden, I stopped getting what Spotify calls “algorithmic playlists”. Because Spotify stopped promoting my songs, my monthly listener count fell into the single digits. This continued for 15-16 months where I had little or no algorythmic playlist streams. Over the past month or so, those playlist streams have been coming back.
I have to believe that the algorithmic playlist decrease is that at the same time Spotify started to promote their own pay to play scam, previously a feature of the third-party ecosystem that grown up around Spotify. You see, you pay these scammers to get your music on a playlist, the playlist supposedly subscribed by humans.
That’s the whole scam, but there’s one hitch. Spotify’s user base went up from 200 million users to 600 million user in less than 2 years. If you think that those 400 million new “users” aren’t mostly bots, then I have a bridge to sell you.
Well, I seem to have settled into getting a monthly listener base of a whole 30-40 listeners since I got more exposure on algorithmic playlists. More listeners identify as female, which is a bump up from before the listener increase. Still a far cry of the listener base of about 250 that I used to have 2021-2023.
Spotify is really a shitty platform. Discovery is almost impossible unless you pay Spotify hundreds of dollars for their promotion. If you use third party promotion services, you risk having your streams classified as fake, getting you banished.
Spotify has a bad actor problem which they don’t seem to want to fix. Their userbase increase several hundred percent over about a two year period. It’s obvious to me that most of these accounts are bots. Major labels use those bots to jazz their streaming numbers and Spotify turns a blind eye to this abuse.
Which is why I direct my fans to platforms not as obnoxious as Spotify, like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Beatport, and YouTube.
