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New Tune Out Soon

Well, my trials with Mirlo.space continue. Five attempts to upload my new tune, full name “More Nervous Energy-250819-001” to Mirlo.space with attempts either terminated after 1/2 hour to an hour, or a relatively immediate abort with no file name given. The excuse is that the developers never thought anyone would use anything but a desktop to upload. This in the day-and-age when phones and tablets are almost as powerful as a desktop. The only excuse is that the developers still regard the software to be beta, though it seems more like late alpha software.

I hope to upload the tune to Bandcamp (https://jaypeach.bandcamp.com) tonight, and possibly upload to https://Mirlo.space from either my laptop, if it feels like working, or maybe my raspberry pi.

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Made a post on Ghost.io

It’s a piece of premium content at https://all-about-music.ghost.io that kinda is a dry review of Spotify’s finances and reasons to direct your fans to other platforms.

It’s my method to see if I can get some subscribers to a slighthly different take on the music business from this blog. And monetize it as my other means of making some bucks are falling on hard times.

Haven’t figured out how Ghost as a blog/newsletter platform works, but I guess it’s a learning experience.

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Guitar Explorations

I just dropped a new tune, “Guitar Explorations 250802” on Mirlo.space and am working to put it on Bandcamp. I hooked up a Fender guitar,that’s one of my favorites, to the pedal board shown and then to a Fender Twin Reverb thru the Vibrato section. Recorded on my trusty Zoom H8 and processed on my iPhone using the AUM app.

Anyway, the tune, should you be interested in listening to it, is to be found at https://mirlo.space/jaypeach53/releases and https://jaypeach.bandcamp.com

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Garbage Picking, Part 4

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.

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More on Mirlo

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.

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More on Music

More on Music; been fooling around with the Nervous Keys preset on my Arturia Microfreak lately. I kinda like the sounds it makes and I’m trying to find a drone sound to use with it. The gear that I’m experimenting with includes the Moog Mother-32 and the Moog Mavis. We’ll see how things go.

The new music that I’m working on I’m planning to upload to platforms I haven’t used before, Mirlo and bandwagon.fm. They’re platforms built to enable artists to keep more of the money generated from customer purchases. And as an extra benefit, no AI training from your music. The plan is to emulate SoundCloud and Bandcamp.

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More on Spotify, Part 2

Well, I have more news on Spotify. The latest stats (April 28) have my monthly users at 30, a 150% increase over the previous 28 day period. So something happened even though Spotify isn’t reporting any new playlists I’m on. I’ve been on a playlist with a measly 4,000 subscribers for months, but I don’t know how I acquired the new listeners. Lets see if the MAU continues at the new level, or if it falls back to the previous levels.

I fail to understand the listener base that Spotify has. They report huge increases in their listener base. Are the new listeners bots that Spotify and other bad actors keep on spinning up? And yes, Spotify is a bad actor. Between the AI “songs” that Spotify adds to its catalog and the pay to play “promotions” that are the only way to get your music listened to, Spotify and Ek are bad actors. and they plan to get worse.

But I’ve been promoting other platforms, especially YouTube and Amazon Music, both of which pay nany times more per song as Spotify. To the point that only about 10% of my impressions come from Spotify, even though industry statistics show Spotify has a 30% share of the streaming market.

I just wish there were more people out there that bought music. There are three platforms that I know of that sell my music, iTunes, Amazon, and Beatport. Beatport gives me the best payout and the music can be really high quality. I suppose I also should mention BandCamp, though not all my catalog is there because their discovery features just plain suck.