I really really really want to share more on LP3 but I feel like my wife needs to listen to it first and give her seal of approval. That’s just something you should do as a musician with a life partner, right?
Hot take. “alternative” acts have the hardest nut to crack re success, but we also have the best and most dedicated fans once we get them
Related: very little “advice” on the social platforms works for alternative acts, nor should it
Solo piano, volumes 1 + 2
I put out two collections of piano music. They’re on Bandcamp right now.
A few months ago on a Friday night, I went down to my basement and impulsively recorded 10 or so pieces of piano music. Some were me riffing on Kid Lightbulbs songs, a couple were totally improvised, a few were revisitations of old ideas I’d laid dormant for over a decade.
I was so happy with how they came out that I played them for my wife and daughter a few days later, and it served as perfect “winding down” music for before my daughter’s bedtime. Might as well post them for others to enjoy and wind down to as well.
I’ve released the set in two separate volumes, six pieces each. Both are meant as Bandcamp exclusives. The second volume is for this coming Bandcamp Friday (10/4), but I’m posting it a few days early. I’m too happy about it not to share.
Each volume is available on Bandcamp for listening or purchase:
I will also be releasing an abridged set of pieces to the streaming services, called SOLO PIANO SAMPLER (pun intended for music tech nerds), on October 11.
You may notice some subtle references to other Kid Lightbulbs songs in the titles of a few of them. Several are reinterpretations / deconstructions of songs – in particular, “trendsetters”, “curiosity”, “hopefully”, “lashing out!!!!!!”, “the worst days of our lives” and “sleepwalking again” are represented in some form in these pieces. There are also a few pieces that tease material for my upcoming third album (though that will remain a secret for now).
I hope you enjoy 😄
How I broke $1000 in Bandcamp sales over 9 months
Yesterday, a music friend & fan of mine bought a double-single of mine for $2, which put me over $1000 in lifetime Bandcamp sales. 
This is a very cool milestone, not just because of how music seems to be quite devalued in 2024, but also because I did this over the span of 9 months (except for $40 made in 2019 from a few sales from an old project I’ve since abandoned). 
After reflecting on it a bit, I realized I did have a bit of (unintentional) strategy (which I backed into) for how I did it:
- put out lots of music regularly (I have a big backlog of it)
- have some kind of merch (even just a few t-shirts helped)
- use fundraisers to drive awareness for both the music & cause (I didn’t keep a significant % of the $)
- exploit Bandcamp Fridays, not just with singles but advance releases of EPs/albums when possible
- promote organically & equally alongside other things - the above points make this easier
If I’m honest, I think the most effective parts were the causes & lining up releases to work with Bandcamp Fridays.
Alongside me building up Kid Lightbulbs, I’ve learned more about the value of divesting & supporting directly folks in need. While I’ve raised money for orgs like The Trevor Project, we’ve raised more money sent directly to marginalized folks here on Threads. Shoutout to ilyBBY for instilling the idea & everyone whose funds helped here.
As for lining up releases around Bandcamp Friday - I actually think this is the biggest thing that made an impact, and I’m glad Bandcamp Fridays are still happening. (There’s one in 3 weeks!)
When I released my 2nd album:
- I opened preorders on Bandcamp for 5/3 (BC Friday)
- Released on 5/17 as BC exclusive
- Released to streaming services ~4 weeks later
I’d probably shorten the timeframe next time, but this, plus a cause to raise funds for at the time, worked so well. Most of the $675 below is from this. 
It’s worth noting that I don’t have any physical releases of my music. All the above (except for the few t-shirt sales I’ve made via Bandcamp) is digital. But a CD editions (and possibly vinyl) of my albums is something I’ve had on my backlog for a bit. I need time (and money) to sort it out, but I am keen to do this.
(As an aside: it would be super cool if Bandcamp had project-specific crowdfunding built in – with this, I could raise funds for a vinyl release of an existing digital release I already have on Bandcamp. Otherwise I’m probably going to end up on Kickstarter or something if I want to take a vinyl release seriously.)
Also worth noting that Bandcamp subscription earnings do not count toward your sales. I’ve also (miraculously!) gotten 5 people to subscribe to my Bandcamp, which gives them access to all my releases and a discount on merch, possibly other things.
Going pro?
I’m considering a subscription to Bandcamp Pro, which is the monthly paid version of Bandcamp for Artists that they seem to completely forget about in their marketing.
I’ve been trying to find a way to build true independence as an online musician, using tools aligned with my values & principles to never feel tied to any one platform. Direct support from fans is great for this, and having a website and email list I control (using services that don’t relentlessly try to take my $ without adding value) are the core, but I still need a way to distribute content to folks willing to support me directly.
I’ve used Dropbox & email to do this in a lo-fi way, and three people even bought my first album through this method, but it definitely doesn’t scale. Also Dropbox doesn’t really have a nice, branded listening interface - just a file viewer in a web browser. There’s decent video hosting options (Vimeo, YouTube though I don’t love being reliant on YouTube either) - but there’s nothing for audio that feels nice and something I can control. Soundcloud is increasingly gross about their paid offerings and seeming tolerance for bots and other garbage, and Bandcamp works but defaults to public releases and their subscription offering.
Except if you subscribe to Bandcamp Pro! Bandcamp Pro offers private listening and selective streaming. This means I can upload bonus material, keep it private, and serve it to my fans on my email list who are patronizing me directly. There are other useful features like better stats & targeting, but those feel secondary.
It’s $10/month, but I get $5/month for the first year as an early Bandcamp adopter. This is great for experimentation - I can take a year at half-price to see if this is worth keeping around.
Ironically, the problem this helps to solve is Bandcamp’s own platform fees. I lose 15% (+ processing fees) on every sale, including subscription payments. But if I sell my music on my own (ie. have fans pay on my website via Stripe), and just distribute the music via private Bandcamp access, I pay $5-10/month across all sales, and only pay processing fees per sales. This is cheaper in the long run, and arguably would have been cheaper if I ran all my releases (and perhaps even a patron subscription) in 2024 this way. It’s distribution as a scalable service — but the customer is mine, not Bandcamp’s.
I’m not sure if this is worth it, but I may set it up as an experiment, once I figure out my longer-term plan for direct-support releases. Watch this space, I guess?
STEP INTO THE OCEAN, reviewed by Erik Dionne of Dog Army
Erik was kind enough to write a long-form review of my second album. He doesn’t have a blog of his own, so I’m publishing it here for y’all’s reading enjoyment (and my own flattery).
The album is an artform unto itself and stands alongside other longform art–the novel, the film, the 10-episode season, or the 10-season series–as powerful and weighty, though, requiring some dedication from both artist and audience. In a world where it is easy to perceive the length of a second as changing–becoming more valuable, demanding each second must be rich with content and emotional stimulation–the album is an undertaking that music artists may find to be fruitless, unsustainable, or even a kind of monkey’s paw (you have to let go of it if you want to persist). Despite this, Kid Lightbulbs damns the sentiment that instant-gratification is the only remaining realm for listeners. In his album, STEP INTO THE OCEAN, he takes the listener on a hyper-dynamic sprawl through indie, rock, industrial, and genre-shedding emotional soundscapes.
The album begins with a minimalist whisper, “this isn’t what I wanted”–musical or confessional, there’s no way to know yet, but the stillness and restraint chills the listener with solemnity, and we have stopped what we are doing–and we are now listening. What follows is a slow crescendo, a slow-motion spilling of information and confession, paralleling the music that begins to pound and swell to craft a track that avalanches far from where it began.
I focus on this track because the dynamics of the opening track are never lost throughout the entire album. But the album does not follow the formula of a crescendo. It always keeps us guessing, and we’re most often guessing wrongly. Where you think a song is ending, an electronic yet warm beat or blazing guitar riff fills the fade, and pulls us along like a sonic undertow into the next section of the track or a new song entirely, without ever breaking a sonic feed. This is “streaming” in the old sense of a constant flow of–yes, I am aware–water. It never stops moving–whether dripping, trickling, pouring, or the churning blast from a wave–we are submerged into the next second of the album with no thought of returning to shore, and that is one of the most powerful achievements of this album: we are constantly moving into the next second and segment, until the coda, without realizing exactly how we got there, but realizing we have moved, and moved a great distance; over what spans, it is difficult to recall. So we listen again.
The album, technically, is quite impeccably produced. The electronic drums are noticeably electronic, but so appropriately electronic, and never losing their energized and emotional impact. They drive forward with lovely, organic swells, ticks, or booms. There is never a disparity between elements–guitars, keys, synths, samples, and who-knows-what-elses all flow and dance together seamlessly to form moments of divine lightness, as in the breakdown with beautiful female vocals in “trendsetters,” or the following brutal pounding distortion and cathartis of “digression (this is so familiar).” While hypnotized, shocked, or deep in some kind of unassignable flow, we’re never discomfited–we are constantly immersed, exactly as Kid Lightbulbs directs us to be.
It’s this dynamic polarity that amazes the listener, but it’s the absolute cohesion–from beginning to end–that mystifies the reflective listener and defines the experience. Each track could be played on its own and enjoyed, but to be honest, I have yet to actually listen to fewer than three simultaneous tracks at a time–the stream is so seamless that I could not even know when to pause between tracks–and I don’t want to.
The length of a second may be more valuable than ever. But it takes a wholly modern album like STEP INTO THE OCEAN by Kid Lightbulbs to remind us that a second in time truly is more valuable than ever, but that our short-form content is offering fleeting bursts of emotional responses which are vapid and cheap, and are so often lost to oblivion moments after experiencing them. Through this album, Kid Lightbulbs reminds us: that every moment can be rich with feeling and meaning, and when delivered through an album’s length of heartfelt dedication and passion, those cumulative moments create an unforgettable experience and a profound work of art to say aloud, “the album will not die.”
Lightbulbs lore: seabreeze
In 2008 or so while in college, I started writing music I thought would be a cool fit for video games, thinking I could pitch a portfolio of my work and land some gigs doing this after college. I wrote this small ditty based on meandering piano chord progression called “seabreeze”, meant as background music for some kind of seaside town in a role-playing game. Submitted it to a few places, never went anywhere.
When I ended up taking a tech internship and that internship turned into full time work, I scrapped this plan and reworked “seabreeze” for an album I started work on — slowed it down, added a shuffle, loaded with reverb, sort of a an homage to Massive Attack’s “exchange”.
That album was sort of a dark take on trip hop with industrial influences, and came to be called KID LIGHTBULB based on a line from a different song (I’ll write about that another time.)
I released that album quietly, and separately started writing another song called “trendsetters” which had the line “I never know when to say it” as a key part of the refrain. This line stuck with me and I ended up noodling on a different song with the same lyric.
That different song was yet another reworking of the same meandering chord progression from “seabreeze”, which I started to simply call “I never know.”
As I was planning an album in 2013 called BEDTIME RITUALS, “I never know” and “trendsetters” were ideas I had under serious consideration - they were related, and the former ended up forming a good pair with a different song called “ritual”, which at the time was much more upbeat than the icier, slower version I ended up releasing a decade later. I ended up reworking “ritual” into the song you may know now, and scrapped “I never know.”
When I started the Kid Lightbulbs project, I revisited “I never know”, rerecorded a sparser version of it, and almost included it in the final sequence of THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. I originally envisioned it in sequence after the track “bubble”, with a smash cut transition. But then I wrote the belong reprise and scrapped “I never know” yet again. It’s now a b-side you can hear as a Bandcamp subscriber. The “seabreeze” piano chord progression has still not seen a release to this point.
Earlier this year, once Kid Lightbulbs started getting some early interest, I began revisiting the BEDTIME RITUALS sessions more holistically from back in 2013-2014. “Trendsetters” was the first song I revisited, and became my first proper single in February. The “I never know” lyric got stuck in my head again and I wanted to figure out some other way to incorporate it into the themes of STEP INTO THE OCEAN.
I had this other old audio session from back in my aspiring-game-composer days, meant as more of an action sequence bit. It happened to be the same bpm as “trendsetters” and I thought they’d pair together nicely. I ended up picking the “I never know” lyrics back up and reworking them into something more jaded and angsty, which then became “digression”.
“digression” also includes lyrical references to a different track back from the KID LIGHTBULB days called “left in ignorance”.
I don’t yet know if the “seabreeze” cut will see the light of day again, but maybe it will? Anyway, the creative process is weird and wild and sometimes happens over decades.
This was fun to write.
Easy, impromptu live performance videos
This might not be that novel, but I figured out a way to record nice-looking videos with my iPhone while getting the audio fidelity from my laptop & audio interface.
Using Blackhole (free with optional donation), you can route audio thru your interface into a DAW (like Logic Pro), then into the Photo Booth app on macOS. You can then tether your iPhone camera to a MacBook to use it as a camera in Photo Booth. The result is a video I’m comfortable throwing on YouTube with almost no editing time.
⚠ You need a Mac laptop with Apple silicon, a DAW and an audio interface.
Here’s how I did it:
Part 1: Audio setup
- Download & install Blackhole
- Open System Settings -> Sound
- Set your laptop’s audio settings as follows:
- Input: Blackhole 2ch
- Output: your audio interface (I use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2)
- Open up your DAW of choice (I use Logic Pro)
- Open up Logic Settings -> Audio
- Set Logic’s audio settings as follows:
- Input: your audio interface
- Output: Blackhole 2ch
- Add however many audio or midi channels needed to perform. I used:
- 1 audio in (ch1) for guitar
- 1 audio in (ch2) for a vocal mic (MXL 990)
- 1 midi for piano
- Enable input monitoring on all channels, so you can hear yourself
Part 2: Camera setup
- Make sure your iPhone is on the latest version of iOS
- Make sure your Mac is on at least macOS Venture
- (Optional but recommended) Connect your iPhone to Mac with a USB-C cable
- Mount your iPhone as a camera in some way, pointed at you
- Open up Photo Booth
- Find the “Camera” menu and select your iPhone
- Note that the video feed should now be coming from your phone’s camera
- Click record
- Start playing
The result:
Bandcamp subscription updates
I set up a li’l paid subscription thing on Bandcamp for anyone interested in directly supporting my creative work. $20/year to get all my past releases, some bonus releases (aiming for 1 a month), and a discount on merch. Maybe more to come.
I’ve been noodling on what to do for this, and I thought it might be fun to re-release some of my older material, including old versions of what has or will become Kid Lightbulbs tracks.
I’m going to start with 2 fun things:
First: The original album where my music project name came from — KID LIGHTBULB. This is ostensibly a very dark trip hop album that I made in 2009-2010. It’s sprawling, atmospheric, slow, and clearly inspired by NIN’s The Downward Spiral. I commissioned some very cool hand-drawn artwork from my friend Tony Hollums back in the day, and I’m happy it’s seeing the light of day.
I may revisit the material at some point — for now, the original version already up and available for supporters of mine.
Second: The original album that eventually became STEP INTO THE OCEAN — my 2016 attempt at an album called BEDTIME RITUALS. It’s basically a truncated version of the 2024 album, with two different songs in the sequence. Also a different (imo worse) mix. But it makes for fun lore. I’ll be uploading this today for subscribers.
Hope you enjoy, and please consider subscribing! https://kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/subscribe
Musical déjà vu in STEP INTO THE OCEAN
One of the ideas I explore on my second album, STEP INTO THE OCEAN, is deja vu - things coming back to haunt you in various ways, and using music to convey or heighten that feeling.Since I don’t expect anyone to analyze the music of a lowly indie artist like me, I thought I’d write a thing describing & analyzing the recurring ideas throughout the album.
(Note: I posted some of this on Threads already, so apologies if it’s a bit of review.)
STEP INTO THE OCEAN isn’t a proper rock opera like my first album, but it certainly explores some central concepts: tension in a relationship, growing older, suffering, anxiety, things like that. The overarching idea is this: life is messy as one grows. Things repeat, sometimes for better, other times for worse, always leading us (and our most important relationships) to grow and in sometimes very complicated ways.
I attempted to convey that a bit through the music of this album, especially through the opening track and final third of the album (though other songs share musical and lyrical ideas as well). Here is a rundown of some examples throughout the album
“She’s too good for me”
“She’s too good for me,” the album opener, might be the most personal song I’ve written to date. I won’t speak to the details that inspired, but it’s largely about watching someone you love suffer. (Note: while my music is rooted in real life, what’s described below is not necessarily autobiographical.)
It’s a bleak way to start things off. It’s also not a conventional song format, with 3 major parts that build from each other until a final comedown. This is where we are exposed to some core musical themes that serve as a basis for growth from this dark beginning.
The song is also the first part of a suite of sorts, with parts 2 through 6 making up the last third of the album. The songs that follow are meant to be a slow ascent from that darkness - until ideas return later in the journey. Because things are messier than we usually expect.
“Head on my heart” + “curiosity”
These two songs are intrinsically connected in the writing process, since “curiosity” came out of me noodling on possible endings for “head on my heart.” (You can actually hear a polished version of that noodling in track 3, the “curious prelude.”)
Thematically these songs are connected as well; where “head on my heart” is about the unease of communicating one’s love for another, “curiosity” expresses an unease about one’s broader life and what you could be doing if not for the things you’re doing now. The second half of “curiosity” sees the narrator finally finding a voice to genuinely communicate their love to another (“I love you I need you more than everything under the sun”), but only after several songs’ worth of growth. The aforementioned prelude almost serves as a bit of a digression (the first of 3) after “head on my heart” in which the narrator is trying to work through those feelings after a romantic episode, but can’t quite get there until the full song plays out.
“belly”
The growth and optimism seen through tracks 2-6 of the album, before returning to the suite, is most acutely seen in “belly”. I didn’t write the lyrics to it (my friend Tess did), but it serves well as an uplifting empowerment anthem that sees the narrator work through their struggles (such as not wanting to be “idle festering lifeless procrastinating”). However, that uplift does not come without struggle (“can’t feel my legs can’t feel my lungs can’t hear my thoughts can’t stop the push”) and perseverance (“I do believe I can change it”). These are two lyrical ideas that return in altered forms.
“trendsetters” + “digression”
“Trendsetters” is what starts to turn upside down the growth and optimism witnessed through the album’s first half. It’s a song about the anxiety of growing older; that anxiety festers and grows slowly in the extended second half and is probably most acutely evoked in the song’s hook (“I never know when to say it”).
“Digression” takes that hook and runs with it in a completely different direction. Once our narrator is anxious again, they spiral outward, lashing out at the systems and authority figures frustrating them. The empowering lyrical refrain from “belly” is twisted in that frustration (“they’ll die before I can change it”) before a smash cut–
And exhale.
she’s too good to me / st. alphonsus
Now we return to the suite introduced by “she’s too good for me.” Part 2 is “she’s too good to me” (obviously a play on the opening song title). It’s a chill lo fi thing that reuses the bass line from the B section of “she’s too good for me”, and serves as sort of a palate cleanser after the tense “trendsetters” and “digression”. I introduce a new vocal melody here, as if to misremember the darkness from earlier, or perhaps as a reprieve from the prior nine minutes of tension.
Part 3, “st. alphonsus”, transitions right in & introduces a new riff that pivots in a darker direction. This song is bleak; it’s a musing on self-pity and self-destruction. I reuse this naive sounding vocal melody from the very beginning of “she’s too good for me”, which serves up a new instance of the narrator realizing “this isn’t what [they] wanted” when their partner isn’t there for a moment.
The song ends with a build from nothing, twisting and tensing up that melody up until a smash cut—
ritual / confession
“Ritual” is part of the suite, but also references other ideas. After the self destructive episode of “st. alphonsus”, we find ourselves pulled back in by simple love, but temptation outside that love keeps looming. The ritual of sorts begins after the line “and you & I collapse into the surreal” - triggered by a key change and a build of looped vocals. This time, the melody from the B section of “she’s too good for me” returns, but wordless and cathartic, as if we’re processing and growing.
“Ritual” also calls back to “we don’t belong,” a song from my first album. A fun fact: These two songs were written around the same time, and an early version of “we don’t belong” was originally under consideration for the album that became STEP INTO THE OCEAN; I scrapped it because it felt too optimistic compared to the rest of the material, and revisited it on THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY instead. That all said: “Ritual” was partly intended as a reflection on the narrator’s struggle to belong in society, and thus reverting back to their relationship with the one they love for comfort. That feeling still exists across the two songs, but I feel like the extended narrative across both albums (unintentionally) adds to the weight of this feeling.
Back to the suite: Part 5 is “confession”, sort of a coda to “ritual” and a poem set to the vocal harmonies of “she’s too good for me”. After the previous catharsis, the narrator is able to confess a few last “sins” (itself a callback to “the worst days of our lives”) suggesting they haven’t fully worked thru the sources of their shame & anxiety, but can at least name them. But at the last minute they question whether it’s easier to keep working or forget.
Forget everything (throw your thoughts into the river)
“Forget everything” concludes the album and the suite, and explores the darker “what if” of forgetting. Bailing. It’s something I’d never do, but I can’t help the rare dark intrusive thought. This song expands upon the bassline introduced in “st. alphonsus” and takes it in an ironically optimistic direction. The song also calls back to the refrain of an earlier track “belly”, largely an empowerment anthem, to signify the difficulty of moving on.
“The worst days of our lives” as a narrative summary
The only song without an obvious reference to another song on the album is “The worst days of our lives.” It stands on its own stylistically in a way (I don’t use nearly as much sidechain compression anywhere else in Kid Lightbulbs’ oeuvre), but I realized it sort of functions as an abstract or summary of the complicated growth that occurs over the course of the album.
Oddly enough, the final section of “the worst days of our lives” (signaled by the only major chord change in the song) contains a callback to different song of mine not on this album, “Off the rocker.” This is a song I made back in 2012 under the name Sophomores, and it got a little bit of attention online and a few remixes. I never made a song like it again, and I’m not sure it still holds up. But “the worst days of our lives” was originally written as a sort of reprise/evolution of that idea meant to signal my development as a songwriter and producer. In a way that could be a weird (and likely overblown) allusion to this whole album concept I’m writing about now. I’ve been sitting with many of these songs for a long time, and somehow they have both continued to reflect feelings I still feel up to a decade after their conception, and have grown with me and taken on new meaning over time.
Art is wild like that.
Internet DIY: My own music selling mechanism
Three weeks ago I laid out some background on why I care about staying independent as an online-first musician, and the principles I’ll try to stick to in doing so. Now I’ll go a bit deeper on one of my DIY explorations: selling my music directly to people who want to buy it.
I have set this up on kidlightbulbs.com, such that viewers can buy any of my music from me directly – not on Bandcamp or the iTunes Store or at a record shop, but via a payment link that I control and from which I receive all the buyer’s money (less processing fees, which are basically unavoidable if you want to accept credit cards). I don’t need to hand 15% of it to a third party. At my tiny scale, this is insignificant, but at a certain scale it means a lot of money the artist does not get for their work.
Background
Back in my late teens, I was in a weird instrumental prog rock band. We built a decent following in southern Connecticut as a niche act. We formed in 2004 - CD burning technology (and piracy generally) was already pretty widespread, but streaming hadn’t come around yet. We also had no idea what other bands were doing to make, promote, distribute their music, so we just tried a bunch of stuff — like burning our poor-quality demos to a CD, slapping together some ridiculous artwork in my mom’s copy of Microsoft Publisher, printing them on my inkjet printer at home, assembling a few CD packages, and selling them for $5 at shows. And we sold some! Between that and simply playing shows and talking with folks before and after said shows, we build this small following that allowed us to open for some national touring (albeit obscure) acts like Fish (from the band Marillion), Starship (fka Jefferson Starship), and The Machine (a noteworthy Pink Floyd tribute band). We also got some press and were offered a management contract at one point– not because we had our stuff played on radio or had a certain number of followers on MySpace and Facebook at the time, but because people were talking about our stuff IRL.
IRL stuff obviously happens still, but overwhelming what matters is online social proof. Yes, you can get press, radio play, and so on, but most artists gain a meaningful following through painstaking, neverending content marketing to push Spotify plays, getting lucky with a viral TikTok video, or being born into money or a recording industry family. Even if you do, unless you are Taylor Swift (and basically only that), you don’t make a sustainable living doing so. We weren’t making meaningful cash as a local New Haven band, but we did make a tiny bit of money on these burned CD sales, t-shirts, and so on – and if the industry hadn’t changed, and we kept at it, it’s possible we could have. Now it simply seems impossible… unless there’s another way.
I like to tinker with websites, always have. I never formally learned how to code but would mess around with services like WordPress and Drupal just to see what I could do with them. Working with software engineers for the last 15 years, I’ve gradually picked up concepts and know-how that has gotten me slightly better at this (or at least awareness of what is possible on the Internet with very little effort).
In the last year, a lot of things happened that ultimately led to me caring about the value of my music:
- I lost a job during a brutal tech job market, which had me exploring myriad other ways of making money while I looked for my next job
- I met a bunch of great musicians (many of which I’d call friends now!) all challenging & lifting each other up to elevate our art and the attention it’s getting
- Bandcamp, arguably the last holdout music platform working in support of independent musicians, got sold again, and then gutted half its staff
- Spotify cut its royalty payouts for all artists generating less than 1,000 streams per song per year, funneling those funds instead to (mostly) major-label artists
On that last one: from a business strategy standpoint, I understand why Spotify changed its royalty mechanics. I’d make pennies for the few hundred streams some of my songs are getting; it was never a viable source of income other than for the extremely successful 0.001% of musicians. But the gesture makes clear the painful reality of streaming: It is for consumers first, suppliers (artists) second, and unless you are in the extreme upper minority of the supplier base, you basically cannot make money in this model. Therefore, I no longer think of Spotify as a source of royalty revenue, but rather a sometimes-predictable marketing channel for my music and the Kid Lightbulbs brand.
Somewhere in the middle of this (in early April ’24), Pharrell decided to release his new album Virginia: Black Yacht Rock Vol. 1 on a random website with no press or gimmicks – you can go there right now and stream or download the whole album for free, with an option to provide your email address.
This is ballsy, but Pharrell can afford to do it. It’s also not the first instance of this – Radiohead did this in 2007 with In Rainbows (introducing the “name your price” model for music sales), and plenty of artists have gradually offered other ways of supporting their craft since then thanks to platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon.
Each of those platforms takes a fee. Again, this makes sense: Bandcamp offers infrastructure that many musicians can’t fathom managing themselves. But in 2024, it’s increasingly easy to set up much of this infrastructure on one’s own, using platforms that everyone (including listeners) already uses. So I did. Turns out it’s actually quite possible to sell your (digital) music without any of those big platforms claiming to be the best or only way to do so.
And if you have even a small base of fans willing to invest, they’ll buy from you – I’ve made nearly $500 on pre-orders alone for my second album (STEP INTO THE OCEAN), about 10% of which came through direct sales on my website. The rest came through Bandcamp, which is fine for now and I promoted heavily, but the fact that I generated more than $0 in money from a website I fully control is interesting.
A quick warning
Before I actually get into any of this, I want to lay out a few disclaimers because there is a fair amount of risk involved with the approach I took. I don’t think I recommend the specific approach I took to anyone unwilling to experiment or understanding the flaws, which I will document throughout this writeup. In a lot of ways, the approach I took does resemble the rough process of burning a CD, printing an inkjet album cover, and slapping it together oneself - but early fans are willing to work with that. I also personally believe that a good fan puts value in the art they’re buying, far more than the distribution method. A set of MP3s is a set of MP3s, no matter how they arrive in your inbox.
How I did it
Here is a list of every tool and service I used to set this all up:
- Stripe, the online payments platform - 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction
- Dropbox as the file storage and distribution mechanism - $9/month (or free if you don’t need a lot of storage space). You can also use Mega.nz, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or basically any cloud storage provider to do this.
- Song.link to dynamically offer links to stream my music anywhere the listener wants - free
- Buttondown, an “headless” email newsletter service - free for up to 100 subscribers, otherwise $9/mo starting price
I could also count Blot, the service I’m using to power this site, but it’s technically not necessary unless you are also writing a blog online. You can spin up a site on a number of services for free or cheaply, buy a domain for $10, and point the domain to that site. I recommend Carrd for this, or a free link-in-bio service like Buffer’s Start Page1.
Chances are, if you use Patreon, Ko-fi or even Bandcamp, you’re familiar with Stripe (or PayPal in the case of Bandcamp album purchases). These platforms also use Stripe to power their payment processing. When someone buys your music or merch on Bandcamp, you lose both Bandcamp’s cut (10-15%) and a payment processing fee to Stripe or PayPal.
Here’s a fun thing about Stripe: They actually have a number of no-code, incredibly consumer friendly services that allow you to take payments online in a great, trustworthy user experience, both for you and the patron.
The piece that’s missing from Stripe is distribution. Distribution is hard; I would absolutely not want to take on distribution of physical merch in some DIY fashion. (I know I could, but I also don’t want stacks of Kid Lightbulbs t-shirts sitting in my basement or the burden of having to package and ship them out.)
Digital distribution, while hard, is a lot easier in 2024. Secure file hosting solutions abound, and some have great solutions for securely sharing large sets of files, like an album of songs in multiple formats with artwork and liner notes. I chose Dropbox because it (mostly) aligns with my values, is super reliable, and even has file access monitoring and password protection on files if I wanted to really lock down this process.
How it works in practice
I need a way to easily share the finished album with people who bought it from me – so, here’s the process as it stands today:
- Someone goes to kidlightbulbs.com and wants to buy an album of mine
- They click on the “Buy direct link” and are taken to a checkout page hosted by Stripe
- They pay however they like
- They get an email confirmation, and so do I
- As soon as I get that confirmation of payment, I simply send the buyer a templated email with a Dropbox link to download the album
Simple as that. It’s like I burned you a CD and emailed it to you.
What if someone emails you in the middle of the night? Currently, they’ll need to wait until I see their email the following morning. This isn’t ideal, but I am pretty sure I can embed the Dropbox link into the payment confirmation email itself, so the buyer can download it immediately after paying.
Does the email look sketchy/unprofessional? I don’t personally think so, because I wrote a concise, grammatically correct and somewhat personalized emial that thanks the user again for buying my music. I’ve had a few people buy direct from me, and they’ve said it’s been great!
Setup process
1) Compress your album/song/whatever, along with its cover art, into a .zip file. On macOS, you can easily do this by selecting all the files, control-clicking, and choosing “Compress.” You can also do this on Windows.
I’d recommend including your music in multiple formats — at least WAV and MP3 — so the buyer has the best quality audio you can send them.
2) Build yourself a simple artist site. I recommend Carrd, Blot, Wordpress or Ghost for this.
This is key. The social networks, Linktrees, and a lot of “artist profiles” block stuff like taking your own payments, or heavily limit what you can do, and many of them have policies allowing them to take down your site or profile without warning, are likely to raise prices due to their incentives to grow or profit massively, or just go away as the tech landscape continues to change. The services I recommend are simple, reliable, powerful and don’t (seem to) have those problems.
Even if you want to stop here because your music is just fine on Bandcamp and Spotify and whatnot, you should have a website that you control. If you are an independent artist and are struggling to figure this out, email me and I will help you.
3) Create a Stripe account & verify yourself. Once you do, you’ll have access to a big dashboard. It looks intimidating and like it was built for software developers — which it originally was! — but there are some quite easy-to-use and (dare I say) fun features in here we’ll dive into.
4) Create your “products” in Stripe (ie. any album, single, or other thing you’d want to sell) and set their prices.
- Click on “Product catalog” on the left side.
- Click on “Add product”.
- Fill out some basic information on the album, single, etc. you’re looking to sell. You can set a fixed price, or click on “More pricing options” to enable name-your-own pricing if you like!
5) For each product, create something called a Payment Link. This is basically the thing you embed on your website to allow visitors to buy from you. You can create one for any price point that you want to sell your products for.
- Find and click on the “Create payment link” button.
- Click the “Buy button” option. (There is also an option to get a simple link, but it’s more work to get it looking nice.)
- Customize to your liking. There are two different designs (I prefer the simple button), and you can customize the text and color of it.
- Click “Save changes and copy code.” This gives you an embed code to place on your site.
6) Put the Payment Link embed code onto your website. Knowing where to paste it depends on your site builder you chose and how exactly you want it to look. Here are a few tips:
- If you went with Carrd, they have an “Embed” block, which allows you to put code into a special block that looks nice and contained around the other elements on your site.
- On Ghost or **Wordpress, you can include an “Embed” block on a specific page of your site in that page’s editor.
- Blot allows you to write whole pages of your site in Markdown, and you can paste the embed code directly into a page’s markdown file. (This is what I did for kidlightbulbs.com.)
In the end, it could look something like this: 
And now you can sell your music directly to fans, on a site you fully control without having to pay out a platform fee.
Other future enhancements or fun ideas to try
**
Add purchasers to your email list automatically Got an email newsletter? Your email newsletter service probably has an integration with a service called Zapier, which is a cool automation service with a free option. You can build an automation that grabs the email from someone who’s purchased, and add them to your mailing list. (Make sure either (1) you ask the user in the Stripe settings if they want to opt into emails from you, or (2) your newsletter service sends that person an opt-in confirmation, otherwise you just subscribed someone to an email list without their consent 😬)
Broadcast to your social channels every time (or every day) someone buys You can set this up with the aforementioned Zapier workflow that triggers upon a purchase, and have it also publish a social post through a service like Buffer.
Discounts / coupons Stripe makes it somewhat easy to spin up discounted pricing if you want to run a sale for a limited time. You can do this by going to your product listing(s) in Stripe, hitting Edit Product, then adding a new price you can set as the Default.
You can also set up Coupons if you’d rather run a sale that way, or offer something exclusively to your fans/patrons at a discount.
I’m not sure if this is worth the effort it took to figure it out. But it’s very nice to know that there is technology to DIY my online selling of music.
Disclaimer: I am employed by Buffer as of this writing.↩︎
© 2024 brandon lucas green