Four albums into my music "career" now and I still feel a little silly about it.
My brother bought a digital copy of my first album from Bandcamp recently and it
was gratifying but also all $5 went to Bandcamp because I owed them money from
selling a couple tapes months ago, because the money from physical sales went
directly to my PayPal account. My spouse thinks by now I've put enough work into
my music that I should be actually making money from it, and the fact that I'm
not making money from it means I need to promote my work more. But the fact is
I'm not sure what more I can really do in that regard. My music is on Bandcamp
where people can buy it. I've got videos up on YouTube, which tend to get
single-digit views in the first week or month after uploading. My first three
albums are on all the streaming platforms, and my fourth was released by a
well-regarded small label. It seems to me that money follows an audience, and
beyond the gradual social networking I've tried to do regarding my music I don't
know what more I can do to grow that audience. All I can do is to keep making
sounds I like, packaging them up neatly with fun little album covers for
listener consumption, and reaching out to say, "Hey, here's some more sounds
I've made!" Regardless of the money, it will feel worthwhile to me if people are
hearing and feeling these sounds, and the music is affecting people other than
myself. But making that happen also requires maintaining a level of
self-promotion.
Something that _has_ changed is that a few radio programs have shared my music
now. I've caught a couple of them on internet radio but they've also broadcast
over the air locally in the Germany, the UK, and Australia. Which is really
cool. And I think that's a result of having this label that's recognized in
the experimental music scene release an album of mine. I just did a little
five-minute atmospheric IDM/ambient kind of track, something I find entrancing
and moving in a very particular way, and now I'm dealing with the delayed
gratification of not immediately sharing it all over the internet because I'm
hoping to make it part of something bigger (another album) and hoping it will
be heard more that way. But I'm also pretty uncertain about whether that will
pay off, whether more people really will hear it as a result of it going on
another album.
Recently I burned CDs of my albums to send to my grandparents because I can't
reasonably expect them to get them from Bandcamp or whatever. I get a real kick
out of sharing music (my own or otherwise) on tangible media like that. Lately
I listen to more music on cassettes than on any internet music-streaming
service, not because it sounds any better (it really doesn't) but because I tend
to listen to albums and compilations anyway and I like the experience of having
this dedicated physical _thing_ to hold my music, of picking up a tape with the
intention of listening to precisely the music that is on that tape and loading
it into a portable cassette player that is just going to play the tape and can't
get any notifications from GMail or Al Jazeera or anything no matter what I do.
There are a number of little music labels that do creative cassette, CD, even
MiniDisc releases for people who like physical formats like this, and sometimes
I think I could almost run one. After I noticed that the track lengths of my
fourth album don't line up _just_ right for perfect gapless playback on a CD, I
learned more about CD audio standards and now I could produce a CD with that
perfect gapless playback. And I'm pretty proud of the cassette releases I put
together for myself. But being able to make the things doesn't mean I know how
to sell them. Most of my tapes still just aren't selling, and I only made very
small batches of them to begin with. It's all very well to live and learn when
it's my own sales at stake, but I couldn't take that chance with other people's
music releases.
***
Money's kinda tight around the house between inflation and some unusual expenses
we're recovering from: an emergency vet visit for the cat (he's fine now) and a
weekend hotel stay so we could bring the kids to my brother's wedding in New
Hampshire (it was nice, but even the cheapest hotel rooms we could find to fit
all of us were not cheap). In fact inflation has been high enough that,
mathematically speaking, the raise I got with a promotion at my day job in
January doesn't fully compensate for it, and management tells me there's not
enough money in the budget to bump my salary up closer to the average. I want to
spend less time thinking about money but it keeps becoming important.
***
The kids are back in school, which since we're doing that at home means my
partner is doing more formal curriculum work with them again. (Mostly the
six-year-old, but the almost-two-year-old is in on some of it too.) They are a
handful, particularly the younger one, who is more adventurous and has less of a
common sense for self-preservation.
I'm starting to feel a little feral from having been inside at my desk or trying
to get the toddler to stop eating markers all the time. I prefer to take nice
walk around town every day but I haven't managed to get out for it in weeks.
We'll see about it today.
