Music reviews are a red herring

Watching some of my music friends show the result of their pursuit of getting write-ups about their music has left me ultimately convinced that “submitting to get your song/album reviewed” is a red herring. I don’t see it as a viable or worthwhile path to any sort of growth of fanbase.

With AI eating search, folks increasingly less likely to even find that review. Reviewers are desperate for traffic, and thus need to rely on a tried-and-true method in 2025: volume. Churn out review after review, use AI to do evaluate thousands of submissions without even listening to most of them and then generate the dozens of reviews based on what an AI summary says might be the most hypeworthy songs, and you’ve got a music blog. Even if you do take that approach, your blog will likely struggle to get even meager traffic, at which point I find myself asking, is any of this worth it?

There are obvious exceptions — the Hearing Things blog and my friends writing at Groove Art Universe, as well as mainstays like Pitchfork and Fantano come to mind — and I would love to read what they each have to say about my music. I think they are viable paths to fans. I hope they continue to exist.

But I didn’t passively submit to them via some service. I’m friendly with the folks at GAU. I hope to slow build enough of an audience myself to get the attention of Hearing Things. I don’t think some random slop post will accelerate that much.

What’s the other obvious alternative? It’s hiring a PR agency.
I could do that, but it’s a lot of $. I don’t want to spend the money right now, and tbh I know few of us can realistically afford it.

So I welcome slow, thoughtful, passionate, word-of-mouth to find my others.

Video exhaustion

I recently started taking advantage of the library card I’ve had for 3 years (support your local library!) and basically never used to read the sequels to my favorite sci-fi book The Three-Body Problem. (It’s an excellent book series that I highly recommend to virtually anyone.)

Since then I’ve really struggled to enjoy or even want to watch much video. It’s excruciating to me these days. I don’t want to stare at a tv screen for an hour let alone a phone screen for 17 seconds. I think this is a fascinating development though it’s frustrating given how hard everything has leaned into video.

I keep trying to make li’l videos to promote the current single and I just can’t bring myself to right now. It’s even more draining than it already was. The fact that this doesn’t bode well for “building my audience” doesn’t feel great, but I keep telling myself that the audience I seek does not need a 90-second video to consider the depth & scale of music I put into the world.

LP4 / “womb”

Yesterday I announced my 4th album. It will be called INFINITE NORMAL.

The first single is the opening track, “womb”. It’s live on Bandcamp now.

This is a deeply personal song for me. I wrote it originally in 2016 during a period where I was engaged and the 2016 election news cycle was happening, a reflection of wanting to curl up and hide from everything only to realize the importance of not doing that alone. It feels timely once again.

It’s out now exclusively on Bandcamp, along with a b-side, “come alive”, which will not be on the album. It’ll also be out on YouTube and a few other select streaming services next Friday, August 8. (This part is an experiment.)

Here is the cover art for INFINITE NORMAL:

Some backstory on the cover art: A big theme of LP4 is performance, the increasingly performative nature of modern life & the often performative things we do to feel normal.

The photo is from the most recent Buffer team retreat, specifically a karaoke night in which I performed Toto’s seminal hit “Africa” in front of my coworkers. I don’t typically like karaoke, but it was a really fun experience that got me out of my shell in front of many people who I’ve become quite close with over time.

Something about this photo, with the angle and lighting the way it was, felt like it captured the darkness & anxiety behind the surface-level joy that I get from performing, and perhaps a larger statement for how we all feel when we perform in public & online. It can be somehow fun and harrowing, revealing and opaque, vital and trivial all at the same time.

More to come on LP4 in the coming weeks.

Every artist should have an ethics page

I think every artist should consider having an ethics page on their site (or write-up somewhere). If we all have stances about things we want more or less of in the world, we should be transparent about this.

I was inspired by the tech writer Casey Newton, who added an Ethics page to his site Platformer. The page is really great - it walks through his financial interests (or lack thereof), what services he uses and has endorsed in the past, and his stance/involvement in the AI industry.

I added a section on this to my own website: https://bgreen.lol/transparency

In remembrance of Toupé, an obscure British band I found on MySpace in 2005

I grilled burgers for dinner the other night, and since then I’ve had this song (really a poem satirizing Elvis) by this obscure British band called Toupé, whom I discovered on MySpace in ~2005. They were 2 bass players (1 4-string playing lead, 1 6-string doing rhythm) & a drummer, like Primus but less dark, more silly.

That was 20 years ago. I still think about this band a lot. They had 3 whole albums and small bit of hype in the UK. They influenced some of how I write & play bass. They’re not completely erased from the Internet, but it was hard to confirm whether they did anything after their 3rd album, Chat! (which is a silly double-entendre using the French word for cat and what it sounds like in English). Turns out they made an EP in 2016 with a guitar player replacing the “lead bassist”, and now I must listen to this.

I was happy to find at least 1 of the members is still making music as recently as last year.

I’m free(mixed castle)

REMIXED CASTLE, the track-for-track reimagination of my last album (RUINED CASTLE), is finally out today on every digital platform on which you can listen to music.

It’s been out technically since mid-March as a Bandcamp exclusive, and I’ve been trickling out each remix gradually as singles as a nice gesture to each of my wonderful collaborators. Those collaborators are:

• Badyears
  
• Mo-Rice
  
• egrets
  
• flat.moon.society
  
• Thousand Gardens
  
• Loopsnake
  
• SuperScience
  
• Okayden
  
• Knucklebutt
  
• ilyBBY

The last 4(!) months of slowly releasing each of these singles, while nice, has been a slog. I assumed it would be to a degree when I took it on, but releasing to Spotify and the other streaming services has gotten pretty easy. What I underestimated was the time I didn’t have to really properly promote any of these remixes, and the anxiety I felt because of it.

I’m not going to release like that again. Even for a great collaboration like this project was. It’s too much on any single artist. I don’t want to release more than 3 singles maximum to promote an album. For something like this that’s purely collaborative and made for the reason of joy, it’s not worth the infinitesimally small possibility of a single track “blowing up” and instead it’s been far more rewarding to simply have the album out in the world. Which happened back in March. It raised a few hundred bucks for creators. That’s the success story, not this 4-month ordeal of singles that didn’t really do much to lift any of the artists involved.

So now that it’s out, I’m free. Time to slow down a little. Onto the next thing. Probably faster than you think. (Wait a minute…)

A non-exhaustive list of the entities aiming to disrupt music streaming

I am aware of quite a few efforts to “build a truly indie-first music service”:

• Mirlo
  
• Ampwall
  
• Sonica
  
• Campfire
  
• Subvert
  
• Audius
  
• Ever (whose website I can no longer find, so maybe they folded?)
  
• At least 3 different blockchain/web3 things, such as Bitsong
  
• A wholly different thing the Transcendant guy is exploring
  
• Likely others

Plus say what you will about Bandcamp, they’re still building things.

While I don’t think any of these in particular will “win” (or even make a dent in streaming on their own), I love that innovation is happening.

There are options now. This is good.

Try them, help them out, give them feedback, use the one you love enough to point fans to instead of a streaming service.

Don’t think of them as saviors. Don’t expect any one to win or meaningfully change consumer behavior from the streaming model of today. That’s a massive task. I see it as a gradual and fragmented shift, one where they enable the artist to shift behavior themselves. Innovation often happens slowly and without most people noticing.

As an aside, it’s fascinating to me how grossly pervasive the idea of streaming is outside of the small independent music community I’m in. I tried Googling “best web services for independent music artists” and all I got were lists of the 7-8 streaming services everyone already knows.

Intense creative energy shift

I haven’t felt much motivation to write prose lately. I thought this was because of the constant reading I’ve felt a need to do lately to ensure I’m up to date on the state of the world, but now I’m realizing it’s also because my creative energy has shifted toward other things in the last while in a very intense and focused way.

My work at Buffer, especially in the past 4-5 months, has taken a lot of creative energy. This alone would have made it fun, but the creative work we’ve been putting in is paying off – the company is growing as it hadn’t in years, and I have the unique privilege of building something my friends and people whose success I care about is helping to support. No job is perfect but this is by a long shot the closest I’ve gotten.

In parallel to that (despite pushing myself to take my time with it), I’ve very quickly put together the bulk of a new Kid Lightbulbs album. I did not plan for it to come together this quickly, but again, creative energy is wild. There is still a lot to do, and I need to think about the degree to which I want to promote this supposed album, but it’s happening.

I don’t know how I’m making time for these things.

SOLO PIANO 2 on hold, also composition is wild

I’ve been dead set on releasing a sequel to SOLO PIANO, but I think it’s not going to happen (at least for now).

The original was sort of a low-effort experiment to test side releases on Bandcamp Fridays and music outside my normal genre in the Spotify algorithm. It was useful to prove out that little BC releases do work, and that genre niches are real on Spotify (a few tracks got playlisted nicely but didn’t grow my listeners sustainably at all because I don’t only release piano music).

So no more piano singles to exploit the Spotify algorithm. Not worth it.

As a fun Bandcamp release? Maybe. But something else fascinating happened - the newer short piano pieces I’ve put together have transformed into source material for LP4. They’re now the basis for nearly half the album. Not something I expected to happen! Composing music is wild.

So now I’m thinking that these little piano pieces are bonus material / sneak peeks to LP4. I’ll be posting them as teasers over the coming months (& releasing in full to my patrons). Here’s one, (currently) titled “nocturne 2”:

On unexpected user behaviors

When you’re building a product for almost everyone, the details matter a lot. And the things different users notice or are drawn to can vary wildly.

I hosted a customer research interview call earlier this week, and the individual I spoke to was a pretty active & happy (already paying!) Buffer user. But her one pain point was that she wanted to be able to take her short-form videos and post them to all of her social channels at once, rather than having to schedule them 1 at a time.

My immediate reaction: Uh, wait, that’s like one of the main, most basic value propositions of Buffer 🤯 🧐 😶

(I kept this to myself, obviously, to be professional)

It turns out that this user’s workflow in the app was not at all what I expected for her use case. She had thought the only way to pre-schedule content was to click on the specific time slots within Buffer’s somewhat iconic “queue”.

But the queue is specific to each of your social channels. She didn’t realize that you could also start prepping a post via buttons that I’d previously thought were so obvious (and our data indicates that most users use them). Once I pointed this out to this user, she was relieved that her feature request was something we’ve had in place for a verrrryyyyy long time 😄

It had me wondering what may have led this user to her particular way of working, and whether we’ve, for years, overlooked this detail around something we thought has been obvious. Do new folks to Buffer not realize that you can schedule for multiple social networks in a single action? There are some cases where it’s more difficult to do this - are those leading folks to believe this isn’t possible? Is it not obvious enough? Is it an experiment to call this out more prominently (such as with a coach mark) worth doing?

There’s no particularly shocking learning or insight here, other than this: That I continue to be surprised by little details, which I think are obvious, not being as obvious as I may have thought.