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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.
Speaking of stats, here’s some stats from Jetpack for this web site. Lots of countries have checked in, which gives me hope that running this web site isn’t a total waste of time.
Here’s hoping for better results in the next twelve months.
Here’s some links for you to peruse:
https://linktr.ee/jaypeach53 – this site has links mostly to streaming sites, although there are sites like Bandcamp and Mirlo where you can listen to some of my catalog. Maybe even purchase some music.
Here’s direct links to the abovementioned sites:
I’ve been getting more plays in more regions on Apple Music lately. Here’s a sample from Apple Music of my reach. The stats from Apple Music supposedly got an upgrade, something I don’t see.
As you can see, I’m now getting listens in 7 countries, so Apple’s been successful in extending their reach outside the US.
And this is a sample of Apple stats for a single release:
Small progress, but progress just the same. And I guess the stats from Apple have improved slightly.
Like I said in the last post:
Well, I had a productive March, with some paintings worked on, some music moved along in the production process, along with some music recorded .
This post will go into more detail about the progress, even though the weather lately hasn’t been conducive to working outdoors. Today we had a wind advisory, meaning 20-30 mph winds, just enough to get the dirt and dust flying if I felt adventurous enough to try painting when it was in the sixties temperature-wise. It’s hard enough painting when the bugs try to kamakaze themselves into the acrylic paint that I usually paint with. Dunno if the oil paints I recently bought will have the same attraction to bugs.
I got a copy of Henry Dreyfuss’ “Symbol Sourcebook” as I’ve been unsuccessful at locating to copy I bought probably 30 years ago. And that being the second copy I’ve purchased. I include those symbols I think are relevant in my paintings. Just another odd way I have of distinguishing my work from others. Though, I don’t think I’m unique in that respect as I think I read that Jean-Michel Basquiat also had a copy of that book.
“Symbol Sourcebook” is a rather primitive compendium of symbols that Dreyfus’s collected in his endeavors. Originally published in the early 1970s, print quality has either degraded through numerous reprints, or the quality wasn’t great to begin with. But this is no concern to me as I just freehand the symbols in the book, to the extent that the symbols in my works only have a fleeting resemblance of the “original” image.
The sourcebook was an offbeat production even back in the ‘70s, collecting a foreword by Bucky Fuller, which is probably how I got introduced to the book.
Well, I had a productive March, with some paintings worked on, some music moved along in the production process, along with some music recorded . And a personal high water mark in visitors, though I don’t know what they looked at because WordPress stats suck so bad.
This is WP ‘s (there goes the fucked up “smart” quotes again) stats page:
It shows 408 pages viewed, from 400 visitors, (which is weird; usually a visitors views 3-5 pages) but only 48 homepage hits. Where are the rest of the page hits? Who knows. And the referer links are significantly lower than expected.
Well, Jetpack on iOS ipad shows different stats than iOS iphone. Here’s the iPhone stats for March:
This time the individual page stats look normal , but the visitor count is different. Way to fuck things up Automattic!
And to just throw a monkey wrench into the mix, here’s Google’s Analytics posted today. It shows significantly lower viewership, more in line with the expected results.
And here’s two snapshots of viewers and page hits which seem more believeable:
All told, Automattic needs to revisit their stats generation process; it seems to be genuinely fucked up.
What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?
I just wish I could paint more often without having the shakes. Between my hockey injuries and the fact that two of my medications can cause tremors, I’m constantly having to compensate for the tremors. Mostly I just avoid any kind of detail work that requires fine motor skills. So my work tends towards that of Basquiat, I wish I could afford the canvases Basquiat used in his work, it might make creating work a little more appealing.
