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.

Be weird as hell

To all the folks frustrated, jaded, pessimistic about art in the age of AI:

Be weird as hell. Subvert expectations with your art / music / whatever you make. Put your heart and sweat into it. Challenge yourself to make something only you can make, something the AI bots cannot replicate.

Give people a reason to have hope that humans can still make original things. That’s what I’m trying to do.

On work-life harmony

I truly don’t think most people in tech, especially managers & executives, grasp the concept of work-life balance in 2025.

Between the calls to force folks back into offices under the guise of “improved collaboration” (not getting into that now), the revival of extreme hustle culture thanks to AI & vibe coding, and other signals, it seems like the norm is once again pushing for as much work in one’s life as possible.

This is, at best, conducive to burnout, and at worst outright exploitive. I am starting to wonder if, for some areas of tech, that is the point – the returns on tech investment seem to benefit a smaller and smaller pool of people, and those who don’t want to work to be in that shrinking pool need to work harder and/or decide whether this increasingly cutthroat culture is right for them. The political landscape in the US also seems to be directly incentivizing this way of thinking.

All to say: I am grateful to be working for a tech company that does not think this way and is still thriving.

There are myriad reasons for it, but I do think a big reason is the investment the company has in its people with focus on the long term, rather than short-term hyper-growth. A key part of this is something I’ve heard folks call work-life harmony: the idea that your work and life complement each other well and combine to form a holistic way of living that works for you and your work.

I think I’ve somehow landed this incredibly lucky thing. I spend more time with my family and my main creative outlet (music) than ever. And I also feel like I’m doing the best work of my career.

In terms of raw time, I do feel a sense of balance between work and the rest of my life. We work a 4-day work week. My job keeps me very busy from Monday to Thursday, but I still have flexibility to organize those days how I best see fit. I drop off & pickup my kid at her preschool because I can work at the coffee shop next door and deep focus, while my wife has some peace & quiet at home. If someone at home is sick, I can help them during the day and work at night if needed. I can use Fridays as if they’re weekend days. I often have a few things to catch up on, but this means I can tackle them as I see fit over the (now standard) 3-day weekend. This also nets me more time with my wife & daughter and a little more time to carve out for music and house projects.

The product I work on (Buffer) is something I actually use almost daily, and I likely would even if I didn’t work on it. My wife plans to too when she’s ready to start back up her photography & crafting business. I get satisfaction from the notion that I’m improving something we both (and other people I care about) use.

Beyond this, we are encouraged as Buffer teammates to really embody our target users - that is, we don’t just “dogfood” the product, but rather think of ourselves as a “team of creators”. I am actively encouraged to be a creator as part of my job, meaning I am empowered to put time into creating & publishing own ideas & projects (like Kid Lightbulbs, my music project) and learn from the act of doing this.

This helps me be a better product manager because I’m doing one better than empathizing with our users — I’m literally being one of them. I build my own intuition on what’s missing from the product and in the market of creator tools, and I can act as a steward & champion of fellow creators in my network, while also gathering their ideas & feedback as inputs.

It totally works, too, from a raw acquisition marketing standpoint — I have personally encouraged dozens of folks to try Buffer and become active users by simply being online, doing my weird music/small-tech-product-manager thing.

My work can be quite challenging at times, and I find myself often busy, but it’s often by design and containing the multitude of things in my life (work, family, creative outlets) that make me me. Thanks to all this harmony, it’s rarely stressful or frustrating, and yet I’m still having an impact.

I think more companies – especially ones building consumer products –  should consider this framing instead of assuming that throwing more hours or more AI at the problem will help.