Some truths about the total insult to musicians that is the Roblox-DistroKid deal. First of all, this “deal” screws creators. We’re supposed to give Roblox a no payout at all license to use our music? Screw that. Its much like the “deal” they made with Snapchat. In return, we get at most more eyes on our music from an audience that views our music as a consumable. In other words, freeloaders.
Year: 2024
Well Between a Stomache Bug and Music Making…
I’ve been too busy to make any blog entries. For about 7-10 days, I got out a number of synthesizers and spent hours fiddling around with them. I got especially good results from a few of them, and made some recordings.
Then disaster struck. I seem to have come down with either a stomache bug or food poisoning. I still haven’t fully recovered and still feel a little woozy. So as soon as I feel up to it, it’ll be time to review the recordings I made to see if they’re releasable material.
Music
What is your favorite genre of music?
I guesss one of my favorite genres is the blues, as I’ve got over 7,000 tracks in my library. However my days of playing the guitar have long passed. I suppose I’ve got arthritis; my hands and wrist ache almost constantly. I find keyboard work to be less painful. I eat these on a fairly frequent basis.
Handpan
I ordered a Handpan from Temu and I’m a little surprised at the size. It’s a big sucker. I’m guessing its about 30-36 inches across. I also have a small tongue drum, another far-eastern drum, which I’ve used to record some ambient-type sounds and released them. Looking forward to releasing some music made with this handpan.
Getting Some Traction on a Couple of Sites
Been seeing an upturn of streams on a couple of sites, namely Apple Music and SoundCloud. Both have upturns of 20% or more. And I’m waiting to see (from DistroKid, my distributor) whether the information gleaned from Songstats in relation to numbers from Beatport actually turn into money in my pocket. I think the positive numbers from Beatport was from activity in April or May. If it was April, I should start seeing data from DistroKid this month or August.
Vstalarm
I recently found a source of samples and stuff at a site called Vstalarm. However their funky site doesn’t allow me to download the samples I purchased. It’s been two weeks in a back and forth with Edgar of the site trying to get access to my samples. Sign me, getting annoyed.
Youtube Cheating Artists
This is the latest graph of YouTube plays. As you can see, a number of times, YouTube takes plays away from me on a regular basis. It’s become more frequent lately and the plays taken away total about 75 plays this past month. It’s bad enough that they don’t have any promotion, but to steal views from artists shows that artists need to ban together to force DSPs to be audited.
Update Woes
Well, here it is 23:45 and I still haven’t been able to complete the update of Izotope’s plugins. I started this process at approximately 19:30. I need to figure out which of the 10 updates or installs I really need, as a number of them are for outdated software or superceded software. It didn’t help that one piece of software, Ozone 11, took an hour and a half to install. And it appears that software is 11 Standard, when I have a license for 11 Advanced. When the shitty Izotope Portal finally refreshes, since I wasted the whole evening waiting on the Portal as the update process needs constant babysitting,
I might as well try to update my Fabfilter plugins as there’s an update to all 10-12 plugins. The update file for all plugins add up to a massive 264 meg, which I hope will be easier than Izotope’s severely broken update process.
Update: well the Fabfilter update of the full bundle took roughly 10 minutes; in the meantime Izotope’s Portal still hasn’t refreshed, so I can’t do anymore updates. Gonna try to reboot the computer to see if that clears up the logjam.
In the meantime, I highly recommend you stay away from Izotope products. Shitty support.
Spotify’s Disengenuous
Spotify continues to have trolls spreading disinformation about their payouts to artists. The 10-K, a financial statement they have to file with the SEC clearly states Spotify pays out 62% of revenues to artists. And clearly their payout has dropped from $.0032 to $.0027. What part of reality don’t you assholes understand? What’s even worse is the demonstrable fact that four years ago the payout was $.0043 per stream.
You trolls must have flunked simple math and gotten an A+ in Marketing for Sleezeballs. You’re no more capable of understanding reality than is Donald Trump.
And I got an email from UMAW saying that they’re trying to introduce legislation that requires streaming platforms to pay at least a penny per stream. That would affect bottom feeders like Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud. And would finally give some money to the artists that deserve to be fairly compensated. After all, most companies are multi-billion dollar operations. Show your support of UMAW at weareumaw.org
Dropped New Songs
Well, I just dropped two new songs, Symbiosis and Brazil Deep Phonk. They’re already available on SoundCloud, and due to drop on most major streaming platforms on June 12. Yeah, that’s aways away, but platforms like Spotify require lead times of up to a month so that their curators have time to check your work out and prepare your songs for Release Radar and similar offerings. Not that the pay to play platform Spotify makes any effort to promote your music unless you pay for the privilege. Anyways check out my linktree at linktr.ee/jaypeach53 for distrokid’s presave pages. Every click you make to presave the song helps me immeasurably, so thank you.
