I canceled my streaming music distributor service

Happy Easter. Canceled my LANDR distribution subscription today (it was up for renewal tomorrow).

This does not mean Kid Lightbulbs is gone from streaming. Everything is still there. I have a few singles scheduled for streaming release (the last of the remixes from REMIXED CASTLE, between now and July), but theoretically those will still go out & I’ll just eat 15% of royalties.

I joked on Threads that this will only amount to something like 20¢, but realistically, it’s more like $2.46 based on how much LANDR has actually paid me out in the last year. Wow, that’s 10x more than I assumed! But it’s also 60% of the value of a single cup of coffee, and 5.1% of the total annual cost of the LANDR Distribution Pro subscription I just canceled ($47.80/year after taxes). I can eat this.

Why am I doing this? It’s not about LANDR’s new weird AI game, though I’m personally not a fan of it. For me it’s about streaming economics more broadly — I’m no longer seeing the value of constantly releasing singles to Spotify et al (and possibly never have), and it’s not how I want to position my work. I envision music in sets, as concept albums, as part of stories I try to tell. Spotify (and, given its market share and major label entanglements, the streaming ecosystem at large) incentivizes short, saccharine

In the meantime, I’m going to use the next while to focus on

• writing prose & new music
  
• sharing more of my WIP publicly, both on social platforms and in my newsletter
  
• live streaming on Bandcamp, Twitch and/or YouTube
  
• experimenting with my Bandcamp subscription and other commerce options
  
• not worrying about my monthly Spotify listener count, which it seems most of my peers worry about a lot

Spotify outage quick thoughts

The speed with which my feed pivoted to anxiety about Spotify’s outage is wild, and shows to me that

1. threads does handle current events quite well
   
2. far too many of us are dependent on a single point of failure for a certain type of entertainment
   
3. too many of us take music far too much for granted in our daily lives
   
4. musicians really need to think beyond Spotify, if anything for redundancy

Some quick updates on Kid Lightbulbs collaborations

A few things happening behind the scenes in lightbulbs land:

First: I contributed a remix to Okayden’s new REMIXES album, specifically of his track “Creatures”. The full remix album is now up on Bandcamp and releases on streaming April 26.

Second: THREADS ON MY ART 2 is coming!

This will be a shorter set, but the same thing: a community-driven set of covers of my music, this time focused on my last album RUINED CASTLE. It’s sort of a companion to REMIXED CASTLE and a completely different vibe. It will feature contributions from:

• Eth Eonel
  
• Eleanor Collides
  
• Impulse Nine
  
• Brenna Menz
  
• Voidpiercer
  
• …and possibly The Great Homesickness and Seoul Metro if things work out

Tentatively out May 2, just in time for the next Bandcamp Friday. More to come.

Faircamp, self-hosted music store, now a self-hosted music feed?

Whoa, so Faircamp (the self-hosted Bandcamp alternative) now supports RSS feeds and podcasts.

Meaning, you can self host a podcast, or perhaps even a Patreon-style feed where patrons can get updates & new releases, with no platform fees. All for the cost of hosting (or free via something like GitHub or netlify) and some light coding.

A lot of these words probably are nonsense to music people, but this is very interesting to me. I have yet to set this up, but it’s as simple as:

1. Organizing all your releases, plus any one-offs you might want to offer to folks as part of said feed, into folders
   
2. Writing some .eno files (basically just text) with the metadata around each release
   
3. Running a pretty simple Terminal command to generate the site
   
4. Uploading it to a host (which could be totally free) with a bit of work)
   
5. Periodically repeating this process for new releases for the feed, which feels like something that could be automated

This creates a Kid Lightbulbs music site, storefront, and RSS feed to alert folks whenever I release something new. This now makes it possible for fans to subscribe via RSS anytime I release something, or semi-automate email announcements (via my Buttondown newsletter) when I release something.

I can even create special download codes for stuff that is exclusive to patrons, and create simple Subscribe buttons in the storefront with a very small amount of text and light coding. This could complement, or even outright replace, the Bandcamp subscription – which has been nice, but has a lot of limitations and I lose ~20% of the recurring proceeds to platform fees.

This doesn’t feel very hard, and something I’d think my small fanbase would be into. Coding may sound scary to folks, but fortunately there are some good writeups online from folks walking through how to set it all up. Plus, Faircamp looks very nice and clean out of the box — here’s an example:

I’m going to try and set this up when I have time.

Habit reversion

I want to publicly apologize to my REMIXED CASTLE collaborators because I’ve been terrible about promoting their wonderful remixes of my stuff.

Life has gotten chaotic again - work is great but busy, kid is not sleeping well again, house requires maintenance, world is highly unpredictable, etc etc etc which leaves little time for this project lately. And when I have that time, I gravitate naturally to the thing I like doing the most: writing and/or mindlessly meandering the piano.

This means that I’ve depiroritized (1) work promoting the material & channels I have to promote (outside of random stuff I post here) and (2) rehearsing for some kind of live set. These are arguably the two most important things I could be doing to build an audience, but I find myself wanting to compose. With limited time that’s all I end up doing. I’m conflicted because I know this limits me, but I think it’s ok if I’m ok with it?

Related: maybe I just need to livestream this stuff?

Rethinking the Bandcamp subscription

I have this Bandcamp subscription scheme set up & I haven’t done much to make it valuable, outside of a way to basically bulk-purchase my entire discography (+ a little merch discount). I also continue to be underwhelmed by playing the streaming game, and would rather be investing in the tiny but amazing audience I do have.

I still have some backlogged music, works in progress, etc just sitting there, and a bunch of other ideas sitting in my head. And it’s one thing to share it on social platforms, but I keep feeling like stuff gets lost in the algorithms.

And so I’m going to try something new! 🤪

I am going to begin releasing some music way in advance to subscribers on my Bandcamp. The first of these is going to be a possibly-finished-but-not-sure-yet EP, which I was planning to release this summer. Subscribers will be able to hear a version of this today.

Alongside this, I’m lowering the barrier to entry - $3/month for to all my EP/single releases and this bonus work-in-progress, plus more regular updates from me. For $10/month you also get all my albums for free, I’ll send you a t-shirt of your choice (I have some more ideas here), and I’ll invite you to my very quiet discord server where we can shoot the breeze about anything we might find interesting.

This may be a total nothing failure experiment, but it’s worth trying something rather than nothing. Subscribe today: kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com/subscribe

On Bandcamp Discover & audience building

I suspect a lot of musicians don’t value Bandcamp because they don’t see an audience growth angle. That they have to bring their audience to bandcamp and they just offer the storefront.

I think the singles-centric approach to streaming is why. We’re used to that now and it fundamentally DOES NOT work on Bandcamp. EPs, albums and merch do.

Their FAQ on their discovery features literally says so (source):

In other words: if you upload a single to Bandcamp it won’t show up on the Discover page.

Instead prep an album, EP, even a random collection of your songs and build a li’l release around that. You don’t even need to charge $ if you don’t want. That will yield a bit of community activity; doing so repeatedly will help build a lil audience. I’ve got a small one (268), but it’s something.

On Elastic Stage

A couple months ago I tried out Elastic Stage for on-demand vinyl manufacturing. The results were fine, but not what I was looking for:

• Cutting up a 50+ minute concept albums to fit on a single LP is hard and detracts from the experience
  
• Digital masters sound off to me on vinyl, definitely warrants a warmer remaster if you’re serious about it
  
• Artwork was not as high quality as I’d hoped
  
• Minimum sell price of $28 for this was not worth it imo

I’m trying them out for CDs now. I can see this working better: digital format, lower price point, easy process. If the artwork quality isn’t 👌 it may not matter as much on the smaller scale of a CD digipak.

I won’t profit much off them, but I don’t feel like a big CD manufacturing process with up-front $$ and if this is a suitable alternative, then great. Physical media for me and my (scant) fans.

I ordered a test print of a deluxe edition I spun up for RUINED CASTLE, will report back when it arrives. If this works, then I’ll have CDs available for all my albums (including SOLO PIANO and REMIXED CASTLE) in the near future.

More Bandcamp stats fun

On your payment summary page (under “tools”) you can see your lifetime sales/revenue, but also how much of that has gone to Bandcamp and credit card processors.

Turns out, thanks to Bandcamp Friday, Bandcamp itself isn’t taking much more out of my sales than PayPal/Stripe/Visa/Mastercard/Amex at this point.

Oh, by the way, I released REMIXED CASTLE yesterday. It’s very very good. This release raised over $200 to help house an unhoused trans musician. Trans rights are human rights.

More on Bandcamp sales & economics

I was very happy to share this finding on the internet the other day:

Oh huh I’m very close to 5000 lifetime plays on bandcamp, that’s fun 😉 kidlightbulbs.bandcamp.com

— brandon aka kid lightbulbs (@bgreen.lol) 2025-03-01T14:43:01.444Z

Building on this a bit: Roughly 75% of those (3,695 to be exact) are since I started Kid Lightbulbs. The rest are random scattered plays from old projects for which I’ve used my Bandcamp account. (I’ve had a Bandcamp account since late 2010 🤠)

I’ve also made $1398 in lifetime sales. All but $40 of this is from the last 18 months. This includes merch (I’ve sold like 5 shirts lol) but excludes recurring Bandcamp subscriptions (on which I make $196/year - wild that 6 people are gracious enough to subscribe to me, thank you all!)

That roughly comes out to 28¢ per play on Bandcamp. ~37¢ if you only consider the Kid Lightbulbs period. It also means it’s roughly taken 2.7 plays for Kid Lightbulbs to make $1 on Bandcamp. (This excludes platform and credit card fees, to be clear.)

What’s most wild is that this doesn’t even account for that many purchases. My stuff has been purchased (on Bandcamp) 164 times, across 84 people. That’s an average of $8.52 per purchase, and the average person purchases my music twice. (My top purchaser has spent $92 on Kid Lightbulbs!!!!!!)

Granted, this also comes with caveats:

• I don’t know or control how often the listener listens outside Bandcamp once they buy. (If I’m honest, I don’t care and nor should any artist if they consider the music the “product”.)
  
• I do know how often they listen on Bandcamp - I have 1,893 lifetime plays from supporters. Even when you add that to the nearly 5k “viewer” plays I’ve accumulated, that’s still a pretty nice revenue-per-play rate.
  
• It’s also quite unbalanced. I know of several folks who have purchased every single thing I’ve released, often for more than my asking price. Super fans are driving most of the money gained from Bandcamp.

But honestly, I think this is great. I’d rather make money from folks actually willing to financially support the project rather than through the twisted economics of streaming (even if they did work in my favor, which they do not). This makes more sense to me than the “go viral and get as many streaming listeners as possible to try and eke out a fan base from those listeners”. I’m not trying to build a massive audience or enter the conventional music industry. I am a purveyor of highly emotive and carefully crafted sounds & words, and Bandcamp is one of my storefronts. (There’s also one on Ampwall.com, and I’m working on another idea — stay tuned.)

I cannot reiterate enough how tiny my actual audience is. I’m just under 200 monthly listeners right now on Spotify. Excluding bot situations, I have fewer lifetime plays there than on Bandcamp. I made more fans by handing out square Kid Lightbulbs cards at the shows I played while on tour with another band last year than most of the other playlists I’ve been legitimately placed on. Most of my “fans” are people I regularly chat with on Threads and in Discord servers. I am extremely grateful for them, and they regularly inspire me.

Imagine if I had just a few hundred, or a thousand, fans worldwide. I haven’t even played live or really pushed this yet. It’s a slower, longer game than looking for a hit on a social platform, but I’m steadily building something here by making smaller & more intimate connections and continuously releasing.

You can do this too. Just shift your focus. Think of your releases as artfully crafted products, not commodities. I think this is how independent artists make their work sustainable and put some kind of market value to their art.

If this was useful, consider following me on Bandcamp 😜