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.

On hacks, arts education, and the bizarre nature of current AI

I greatly admire Mike Doughty as a songwriter. He shared what I thought was an interesting and compelling writeup on how he uses AI and where he thinks it’s all going. You can read that here.

There is something fascinating about the truly bizarre things an AI can spit out now & in the last 2 years or so, and I agree this is a thing of the current time that will go away quickly and become boring as AIs get “more accurate”.

But the biggest standout point made by Mike is this which I think is the thing nobody wants to talk about, and it’s similar to the “taste matters most now” argument I’m seeing in tech:

— Hacks are in trouble. If somebody is making work that is uninspired, and unindividual, then they can indeed be replaced by a machine that just spits up boring chunks of mid-ness. (But for those of us who at least consider ourselves artists with a style, a viewpoint, and an identity, a thinning of the field is, by some, being quietly welcomed as good news)

I don’t use AI much outside of work (& frankly some of the use cases aren’t compelling yet), never in songwriting, but I did use an old Stable Diffusion model to make the artwork for my 1st album THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. It was uncanny and bizarre and fit the tone of the album, and I didn’t have the words I felt i could convey what I was looking for to an artist. I wouldn’t do this often (usually I use my wife’s photography), but it worked for me at the time.

This is the artwork:

Was this a bad thing? Should I have just hired an artist? Maybe. But I had no idea where to start, no words to even describe what I wanted, and a simple interface to iterate on those words & see the result was powerful. I can’t deny it.

Could I have taken that idea, handed it to an artist and said “ok now make this more human”? Sure, but I don’t know the value of that other than to pay an artist. At some point I could just divest $ to an artist I like (which I do regularly, I have receipts).

That all said, I refuse (today) to use AI in contexts where I can bring my skill & craft: songwriting, music production, prose writing, analysis. I consider those to be the strongest ways for me to convey a style, a viewpoint, an identity that is greater than myself. I also aim to work with other artists beyond what I can do myself, to leverage their styles and viewpoints. The humanity in arts & craft are important to me.

I think education & exposure around these things are so vital to our humanity. I do struggle to communicate visual things, and I suspect many do as well, likely due to our education system continually defunding the arts if we’re honest.

I generally think the more we can apply nuance to debates about AI the better off we’ll all be. It’s not productive to blanket state that all AI is evil. It’s better at search than Google. It does help do some things faster. It’s also worse for the overall quality of media, incentivizes disinformation & disincentivizes critical thinking. Ethics matter a lot. There are conflicting reports about its environmental impact relative to other problems in the world. It’s moving fast, and arguing in absolutes doesn’t feel productive.

A crossposting life hack

This is such a silly thing but it helps me out a lot:

I got into a habit of defaulting to posting on Threads, which was great! But I started neglecting other places online like Bluesky & LinkedIn, and I’m keen to try out Mastodon more. So I made a little shortcut to gradually fix my habit, using Buffer’s iOS shortcuts support to take any Threads post I forgot to crosspost elsewhere and quickly do that.

The steps:

1. I post something to Threads and forget to crosspost it with Buffer
   
2. I tap & hold on the post and select “copy”
   
3. I pull down the control center menu and tap the Shortcut icon
   
4. The shortcut asks me where I want to cross-post it to
   
5. Once I pick which platforms, it handles all the queueing up for me
   
6. Either instantly, or in a few hours if I want to pre-schedule the post, it’s there

You can download the shortcut here. It’s tailored to my specific use case (text posts syndicated to the profiles I’m trying to build a little presence on), and won’t work for your of the box, but you can customize it to your liking in the Shortcuts app. Note that it requires the Buffer iOS app to work 😜

Here’s a fancy video showing it in action:

This is such a silly thing but it helps me out a lot: I got into a habit of defaulting to posting on Threads, which was great! But I started neglecting other places online (like Bluesky 😜 ), and I'm keen to try out Mastodon more... so I made a little shortcut to gradually fix my habit:

— brandon aka kid lightbulbs (@bgreen.lol) 2025-05-14T10:58:23.652Z

The THROW MYSELF story

A few months ago, I wrote 3,500 words, somewhat impulsively, on the narrative and gestation process for my third album, RUINED CASTLE. I really enjoyed doing this and was indirectly prompted on Threads to write more about how my songs have come together and changed over the years. It’s no secret that much of the music I’ve released since 2023 is many years old (though some have been updated or reworked) and the meaning of songs have evolved for me over the years.

It felt appropriate to start with THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY (my first album as Kid Lightbulbs), as I left out a fairly significant gap in time in the original post: how in 2020 I started getting back into music after putting it aside for a year, and how it ultimately led to everything I’m doing musically today.

Structurally, THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY is a rock opera simply about a privileged person not handling well a number of curveballs life throws at them. Whereas my other albums use a lot more symbolism, this one is pretty direct & autobiographical and came directly out of the pandemic period. It’s almost not worth the time to summarize the plot, because the story likely becomes clear as you read the story of how the album came together.

I almost called this post the “belong” story, because “we don’t belong” (and its various iterations) is both the song of mine that started the journey to this album and one of the main foundations for its sound. I put together a compilation of all the recordings related to “belong” I recorded over the years, exclusively for Bandcamp subscribers. Check it out and consider subscribing here.

But I digress:

I. skyscrape

I mentioned in the RUINED CASTLE story how, in 2011 or so, I worked and then shelved a whole album concept called A CITY BEHIND CLOSED DOORS. One of the songs from these sessions (which actually goes back to 2009, if I’m remembering correctly) was called “skyscrape”. It was this odd, loud, almost post-hardcore thing but in 6/8 time and with all these little industrial textures powering it forward. I thought it was one of the coolest musical ideas I’d come up with to that point. It was sort of the intense catharsis song of the proposed album; it still blows me away a bit in 2025. But I never wrote another song like it. It didn’t seem to fit anywhere in an album sequence, and the vocals sounded grainy and I couldn’t recreate them again successfully. So I put it aside.

After I ended up scrapping ACBCD and started the Sophomores project (in ~2012), I had this idea to take elements of “skyscrape” and turn it something more accessible - ground it in some kind of more conventional guitar or keyboard riff, but because I’m a horrible guitar player, I came up with this incredibly minimal one using a couple of power chords but still using the syncopated rhythm from the original “skyscrape”. There was one version I left in 6/8 time, but it felt more right switching to a more conventional 4/4. This version could serve as a true pop song.

At the time, I had also started a new power pop / stoner rock band with a few friends in Boston called Socialist Salesmen — I brought this new “skyscrape” idea to the band and we finished & recorded a 4-piece rock band version of the song, sometime in 2013. It’s quite similar structurally to what eventually became “we don’t belong” — after I left that band, I took the idea back, recorded my own version with electronic drums, added the “no we don’t belong” refrain, and changed the title.

This was around the time I was working some other ideas humoring other sonic interests of mine. I was really into the indie rock & indietronica acts at the time, like Baths and Yeasayer and Young Magic, and I wanted to have a solo project making use of these sounds — lush, a bit frenetic & glitchy, rhythmic, fun but (in my case) dark. The material I wrote following this vision ended up being an album called BEDTIME RITUALS, and mostly captured the increasingly complex feelings of my relationship with my girlfriend (now my wife), who I’d just moved in with for the first time. (This album I later finished and released as STEP INTO THE OCEAN.)

I originally had a sequence of BEDTIME RITUALS that included this 2014 version of “we don’t belong”, but it was far too joyful in tone compared to the otherwise brooding and messy material making up the rest of the album (think about this back-to-back with “she’s too good for me” 🫠). So I shelved it again, moved on, recorded some more, moved to Germany, and wrote the album that became RUINED CASTLE. As mentioned in the other post, I had stripped “we don’t belong” for parts, rearranged it primarily for piano and synth bass, brought in new lyrics, and renamed it “belong 2”. Then I stopped making music for a while.

II. farm country

In October 2019 my wife and I moved into the house we currently live in. I was excited to have a basement that was oddly well-suited to become a mini home studio, and between that and the new rural surroundings I felt a new energy to make music again. Prior to our actual move, I had seen a religious ad on an MBTA bus I was riding in Newton (a suburb of Boston), that mentioned the phrase “come and see” – but the ad felt otherwise ridiculous and over-to-top to me, so I quickly imagined a satirical pop-punk song around that idea, wrote a few lyrics on the bus, and then quickly recorded a demo for it. This became the inspiration for the sound for my next album – steeped in late 90s pop/rock nostalgia. I didn’t necessarily want to stick to pop-punk, but I felt an urge to pay homage to the music I grew up with.

I think the next song I wrote specifically during this time was called “full life” (later retitled “spiral song”), after contemplating what life would be like in the quieter surroundings my wife & I found ourselves in. I was noodling with some synth patches in Logic and found myself playing one of the original syncopated guitar melodies from “skyscrape”, but with the synth tone it took on an entirely different character. With some sparse piano chords underneath it and a frenetic drum pattern, it started to feel less cathartic, more anxious – like the storm after a calm that hadn’t broken yet. It embodied well the anxiety I felt around what life might be like in this new setting, and the song quickly came together (other than the guitars, which were notably missing from this original session).

Five months after our move to rural Massachusetts, the COVID pandemic happened. We found ourselves isolated but also somewhat liberated from the need to participate in “normal society”, which resulted in a lot of reflection in each of us. I wrote a lot over the next few months: “arrangement”, “hive mind”, “bubble” and “loser in the free world” all came fairly quickly as synth-pop bangers, the tone across all of them (again, still missing guitars) feeling urgent, frustrated and vital. I also wrote an early version of “lashing out!!!!!!” (without the exclamation points in the title) after reflecting on a few moments of frustration with myself in how I handled this time. I need a sort-of palate cleanser song in the mix, so I revisited this older song from the Sophomores days called “soften” and re-recorded it as this very slow, atmospheric jam. I envisioned as the ending track to an album, immediately following “bubble” in the sequence and meant to evoke what it felt like being inside the titular bubble.

Oh, and I had drafted a fun little cover of the 1997 Robyn single “show me love” as a more direct homage to my childhood influences (this has not yet seen the light of day).

This album was originally to be called FULL-LIFE (an homage to the spell in the Final Fantasy games – “spiral song” included a few other similar references). The track listing was to be:

1. arrangement
   
2. come and see
   
3. lashing out
   
4. full-life
   
5. show me love
   
6. free world
   
7. hive mind
   
8. bubble
   
9. soften

I had envisioned releasing this album in late 2020, while my wife was pregnant with our daughter. I got so wrapped up with work and the pregnancy that I spent almost no time mixing or preparing any sort of marketing plan, and found myself unhappy with the album after putting it aside for a few weeks. It lacked the punch I aimed to convey through the lyrics and I couldn’t land a sound that supported the punch. So I put it aside for a while, instead focusing on my day job and supporting my wife during the pregnancy.

III. dad

After our daughter was born I was stressed out (this was March 2021). The childbirth experience was not what we expected. (I will not get into details as it’s not entirely my story to tell. It directly inspired “oxycodone”. I will leave it at that.) Plus the simple fact that I now had a small child that I had co-created and now needed to keep alive was daunting. Though I won’t take away from how wonderful the first few months were. Parental leave is amazing and it’s truly awful that so few Americans can actually experience it. It was wonderful and harrowing and calm and challenging all at once.

I remember noodling on the piano a few months after she was born and playing this little frenetic riff that made her laugh and thinking about how crazy all this was. I thought more about how I would wander around our house and yard with her in my arms one trying to calm her down from crying. And “hopefully” came from that.

I remember going back to work and struggling to balance it alongside supporting my still-recovering wife and now my daughter and feeling so exhausted but knowing I had to keep going for them. This led to “it’s for you”, which I later decided was the pessimistic outlook on this feeling and rewrote it as “sleepwalking again” after feeling my exhaustion turn a corner. By late 2022 I had an even larger set of songs that were roughly of a consistent sound and vaguely thematically connected – being a privileged, millennial white dude suddenly having a whole lot of responsibility and curveballs thrown at him all at once and not always handling it well – and it started to feel like a rock opera in my head.

IV. american metal

I finally found some energy to record these last few songs (including “honeymoon is over”, which was a sarcastic little ditty reflecting on the 2020 election and its aftermath, attempting to ground this album in some real-world context), and I discovered this silly little guitar tone preset in Logic Pro called American Metal. Tweaked a bit to my liking, it was the missing element to that urgent tone I was seeking for all of this material. Prior to that I had pretty terrible experiences recording guitar, mostly due to my own lack of practice or training. But modern amp simulation had come a long way since I’d last tried, and this unlocked the entire album for me.

I started adding metal guitars to everything in this set. My original demo for “lashing out” no longer fit the mould (it had more of a mid-2000s indie rock feel akin to The Temper Trap), so I set to rework it applying some more of the stress and frustration with myself I had felt during my wife’s pregnancy and the early days as a father. As mentioned in the RUINED CASTLE story, I had lifted a piece of an old song “the sun’s coming down upon us” to use as the chorus to this reworked “lashing out”, tweaking the lyrics to be much more active and aggressive, from:

i’ve gotta get these feelings out of the way
the city’s pulling me into the bay

to:

i’ve gotta get some feelings out of the way
don’t wanna throw myself into the bay

This became a thematic centerpiece for this album for me, and I ended up lifting the above line to use as the title for it.

Sequentially, the album came together quickly as well. I dropped “soften”, “come and see” and the “show me love” cover, none of which felt fitting anymore, and needed a few extra things to round things out:

“spiral song” never really had a proper ending, but I had this idea to transition it somehow into “lashing out”, with the idea that the protagonist of this rock opera would spiral to the point where they’d start lashing out at their partner unhealthily. I found myself digging into my archives, and revisited the lyrics to “hope inside my baby’s heart” – a song I had written back in 2018 reflecting on my wife struggling with health challenges. I found something poetic in reusing those lyrics, but from the perspective of someone spiraling and not handling that situation well, and fit them in alongside a pitch-shifted version of the “spiral song” synthesizer riff. The riff was pitched up a half-step to G# major, which then resolved to the C# root of “lashing out” – and thus the interlude track “??????” was born.

I had the idea for the one-two punch of “arrangement”/“honeymoon is over” for a while. Originally “arrangement” was to seamlessly transition into “come and see”, but the more abrasive “honeymoon” felt like a better fit both tonally and lyrically. But something was missing between this opening and the rest of the album sequence, which started with the mechanical, broken down “loser in the free world”.

Oddly, “we don’t belong” fit really well in this spot, but I had mangled that song so deeply by that point, having re-recorded 4 different versions in different genres, even writing 2 whole different songs (“belong 2” and “spiral song”) using its parts. But the original song, now with more abrasive guitar tones, seemed like it might work. The missing element was to switch it to a cut-time 4/4 beat, an idea I lifted from the Socialist Salesmen version of “skyscrape”. This combination of ideas is the resulting version of “we don’t belong” you hear as track 3 on THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY.

V. linkedinfluencing

I had written this other song for the end of the album, called “I never know”, but it also started to not fit for me. It was quite meandering and I couldn’t land a vocal performance that I was happy with, and I wanted something more triumphant toward the end of this album (as a pairing to “sleepwalking again”). Now that “we don’t belong” was back in the picture, I had the idea to write a short reprise of its main refrain.

At the time (this was now late 2022), I was frustrated with my job. I started to post on LinkedIn to try and build a bit of a personal brand for myself, to try and drum up interest for a new potential job. (As a total aside, this I believe played a key role in me landing my eventual job at Buffer.) I posted some hot takes about product management, and suddenly started amassing a small audience on the platform. This felt very bizarre: out of nowhere, I started having random product managers and tech people “following me” because I said some things that nobody was saying but people felt. This was also at a time when certain other white men were doing similar, often in podcast form, but on subject matter I found morally reprehensible. The whole thing felt a bit insane, and this is where the “belong reprise” came from.

And then the album was done.

I almost put it out under my own name, but with how abrasive it ended up being, it felt weird under my own name. I joined Threads and started talking about the music, even publicly musing on whether I should adopt an alias. And from there Kid Lightbulbs was born, through the process of making and then talking about this album.

THREADS ON MY ART 2

Once again, the Threads music community has come together to cover some Kid Lightbulbs material (this time from my last album RUINED CASTLE). It’s out now, exclusively on Bandcamp for Bandcamp Friday.

Each cover is a complete reinterpretation of the song in a genre of the artist’s choice. The artwork (made by my wife Alicia) is hand embroidered because…well, threads. I am grateful to my online music community and am once again blown away by its work.

The genres on this collection are all over the place, spanning from emo, to britpop, to prog rock, to experimental a capella.

It’s truly a gift to be able to work with these musicians and grace my songs with their craft.

Out today; all proceeds will be donated to the ACLU.

Niches vs subcultures

I was in a group chat in which the topic of subcultures came up, and what it might be like to create one in 2025. I don’t know that subcultures can be actively created but rather form organically based on a shared set of values, interests and aesthetics.

As musicians (or creators more generally), we are constantly told to find and exploit a “niche”, which is also a set of individuals bound together by a shared set of values, interests and aesthetics. But to me they could not be more different, because they come from totally different places and have different end goals:

• Niche = a group that comes together based on a shared interest which is identified & cultivated by someone with capitalist goals/incentives
  
• Subculture = a group that comes together based on shared interest organically, without capitalism playing a role

We are advised as creators to find our niche, but in practice that often means we need to create the niche (via profile descriptions, consistent narrative in posts, vibes generally) and see who latches on. This feels almost like you’re manufacturing subculture in a way — but for ultimately capitalist reasons. You do this to find an audience to eventually monetize.

Subcultures manifest organically. The goal is not capitalist, but in belonging and (in a way) community support. Niches manufactured by a creator (brand/influencer/corporation) create a false sense of belonging, as if you belong with those also in the niche, but the goal of the creator is to monetize you. The minute you are not monetizable, you “churn” akin to someone canceling a Netflix subscription. You get emails kindly nudging you to come back because of some new podcast episode or discount for merch. You feel fomo, but that fomo is social pressure, induced via ultimately a capitalist origin point - the creator and their niche you found yourself in.

Subculture does not care whether you’re in or out at any given time. It just organically comes to life and dies when it’s no longer needed.

But how does it sustain? What keeps it going? What keeps the people a part of the subculture? Care — care to a degree beyond the desire to simply “be part of something.” The members (or at least a core few) creating real events, happenings, art, commerce for the good of the subculture but not with capitalist goals driving it. It’s not enough to just have folks care.

I think this is why we don’t see “subcultures” anymore, and ones in the past didn’t last long. Keeping one alive is a lot of hard work. Finding and exploiting a niche is pretty easy by comparison.

(Special thanks to ilyBBY who contributed many good ideas to this post.)

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.