REMIXED CASTLE: listening party, thanks, community & joy

I am overtaken with joy the more I think about REMIXED CASTLE. We’re holding a listening party to celebrate it and listen to the whole thing — it’ll be on March 5 at 8pm ET (sorry folks in Europe/Middle East!!) You can rsvp here.

This is now the second instance in my short time as Kid Lightbulbs where the community has come together and made a wonderful piece of art, and a time capsule for this community, completely organically. I literally asked publicly if folks want to remix any of my stuff, and then 2 months later, this album existed.

And it’s. So. Freaking. Good. I so deeply appreciate all the collaborators on this thing.

But also, I think this is a repeatable pattern for independent musicians to both build community and broaden the scope of their work.

• Each participant now has a new project to add to their repertoire
  
• Everyone now has a new project to promote
  
• Everyone has become (internet) friends in the process
  
• Everyone benefits from a multiplier effect of everyone promoting the project
  
• Everyone benefits from the plays / sales from such a project, which can enrich the community or be diverted to someone / a cause in need

Speaking of which! We’re pooling all Bandcamp Friday proceeds from REMIXED CASTLE and divesting to a fellow trans musician in the community who needs the support on a number of levels. Anyone who buys the album 3/7 (next friday!) will be directly supporting this individual in need, at a time when support for the trans community is directly under attack.

Community is joy. Community is support. Community is power.

REMIXED CASTLE

I am thrilled to announce REMIXED CASTLE: a track-for-track reconstruction (pun intended) of my last album, RUINED CASTLE.

This is not your typical remix album — this is a complete reimagining of the album featuring remixes and reinterpretations from some excellent musicians in the Threads community. It’s a rollercoaster of its own design.

Out 3/7 exclusively on Bandcamp. Each track coming to streaming throughout March, April and May.

Blogging & RSS are the next phase of creator culture

I tried writing something for my newsletter about the power of newsletters and ethical options for those not wanting to support ones that, say, platform or are funded by far-right zealots. Halfway through I got bored and then started questioning why I was energized by this topic. (I still posted a short version of it.)

Truth is, the idea of committing myself to a weekly (or even monthly) newsletter stresses me out. I don’t want to get stuck on a hamster wheel. I also don’t feel great about asking fans of mine to subscribe monthly to a newsletter with a specific commitment — that starts to put a price tag on my writing. I’d much rather feel free to share ideas when I have them, and encourage readers & fans of mine to patronize me entirely at their discretion, on a one-off or recurring basis. If you happen to send me a recurring donation, that’s great and I am super grateful! But I don’t want you to feel like you’re paying for a specific number of emails from me each month.

So I’m back to old-school blogging mentality, and it’s quite liberating. Functionally it’s probably similar to a newsletter, but the framing is different: Instead of committing to a specific cadence of writing, I’m just posting stuff when I want and then compile links to everything I wrote into a newsletter each week I have something.

I don’t think enough people realize the true power of a simple blog. Yes, newsletter culture took over because of the wildly successful engagement hack of email and Substack’s rise – but a Substack is really just a blog that also sends out emails anytime you post. It’s quite easy to set this exact same thing up with a Wordpress site, Medium blog, or really any ol’ blogging service¹.

Almost every blog — like my own — have an RSS feed built in. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s a standard almost as old as the Internet itself. I actually love RSS because it’s a way to read the newsletters and blogs I love, but without the stress of notifications or the frustration of a cluttered email inbox. (My RSS app of choice is Reeder Classic, for those who care!) If you find yourself overwhelmed by social networks and notifications, I highly recommend getting one. Many are free or quite cheap.

Pretty much anything can be set up as an RSS feed. You know what else is based on RSS? Podcasts. Your Bluesky profile. You can even make an RSS feed out of someone’s Instagram posts. The musician in me really wants an RSS feed that updates anytime I release new music; Bandcamp doesn’t have this built in, but (1) I could simply post a blog post anytime I release something or (2) explore Faircamp – the self-hosted, ethical alternative to Bandcamp – which has RSS built in².

How does this relate to newsletter? Well, so Buttondown, my newsletter service of choice, has a (paid, $90/year) feature that “listens” to any RSS feed you want it to, and automatically preps a newsletter email based on the content from the feed. You can either send an email with each new post, or aggregate them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. You can also automate this entirely, or create drafts of those emails and make final tweaks before you send.

I’ve now set up my newsletter to do exactly this. It’s kind of amazing! I don’t have to specifically write a newsletter each week or month – instead, I can simply post to my blog whenever I feel like it (including when I release new music) and my audience can still get it however they like: in their email inboxes, or in an RSS reader app of their choice. I could even build audio blogs (or podcast episodes?) into this framework.

This could be very important (or very fun) for creators struggling with keeping up: You don’t need to make these fancy newsletters, or feel burdened with the idea of keeping up with one, or pay for an expensive or questionably ethical service for one. Just write a blog and people can subscribe to that in any number of ways, one of which is email.

One downside is that it’s not totally free to do – Buttondown’s cheapest plan with this feature is $90/year after all, and while other email marketing apps offer this, they also don’t for free (Mailerlite and Mailchimp both have a similar RSS-to-email feature on their paid plans.)

Well, it gets more interesting: I recently found a service called Feedmail. This isn’t a proper newsletter service, but rather a service that takes an RSS feed — yes, like your blog’s RSS feed — and sends an email out anytime there’s a new entry in the feed.

It’s quite elegant, for both creators and their audiences. And it’s also (basically) free! There are two ways where it becomes not free:

• Your reader can choose to pay after receiving 400 emails worth of updates to your RSS feed. After the 400th email, they can pay $10 to get 10,000 more emails sent to you.. This is a little weird – but the idea here is that the reader is paying for an email service that aggregates feeds they want to hear from in their email, so it does so (at a very low cost). A reader can also use Feedmail for any other blog feed, not just yours.
  
• Alternatively, as a “feed owner” (ie. creator), you can choose to pay on behalf of your readers, which means you can send out up to 400 emails for free (or, say, 10 emails to 40 subscribers), and then you pay 0.1¢ per email after that. With this math, if you have 500 people “subscribed” to your feed via email, you pay 50¢ for each email send. Send a weekly recap, and that’s $2/month.

It’s a little bit too minimal for my taste, but it’s an important option to have in your toolkit if you, like me, want to write more freely without the burden of a specific newsletter cadence.

I don’t expect any of these options to be the “right” way to do things; what’s more important to me is that folks in my audience know that there’s more out there than a TikTok profile and a hundred “newsletter services”, most of which are run by venture capital. You can communicate to an audience so easily on the internet in 2025 with technology that’s been around since 1999. And it’s kinda fun to tinker with too.

Some ethical newsletter alternatives

As I’ve stated before, I care a lot about the ethics and principles I try to follow with my creative work. This is a lot easier in the creation process than it is in the marketing process, especially if you are trying to stick to the values I put in place and/or are broke.

I find myself thinking a lot about ethics when it comes time to promote myself. I am technically an extrovert but, as a New Englander, I get viscerally uncomfortable bothering people. I don’t want to be bothered, and I assume nobody else does either. So marketing a music project online — especially in 2025 when 10,000 new songs are published to Spotify daily — is not a thing toward which I gravitate. The way social media has evolved into a certainly does not help.

Fortunately it seems like there are a lot of options out there for those who need to promote themselves but don’t want to get sucked into the echo-and-rage-cocktail chambers of social media. One obvious option is to use social marketing tools like Buffer (disclaimer: yep, that’s my employer) to post promotional content with actually being there. Another is the newsletter.

I think many creators do have newsletters, and I’ve subscribed to a few myself. This right here is technically part of an edition of my newsletter. It’s also posted to my site/blog thingy, and I use a service to collect subscribers who wanted it delivered to their email inboxes.

It still feels gross to me. But it’s somehow still wildly successful in 2025:

• 4.5 billion people have email addresses.
  
• Over half of “consumers” (gah that word) say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions
  
• Email seems to have a really high return-on-investment – on average, every dollar spent on email marketing yields $42 back. (This feels wildly skewed toward certain types of businesses, but hey you get the idea.)
  
• It’s estimated to be 40 times more effective at gaining customers than social media posting.

I need to make my output known to the world (both music and writing like this), and ideally I’d love for some folks to buy it as long as I keep putting it out. Email newsletters are really good for that. Not only should every artist or creator have one – but it should be a primary way to communicate, one of the things you get potential fans & supporters to commit to (as opposed to following you on an algorithmic social feed where they’ll probably miss 70% of what you post).

The good thing is that it’s really easy to start one! There are a hundred options now for starting a newsletter. The not-great thing is that the most popular ones are rife with bad incentives, especially for creators.

Let’s talk about them: Mailchimp and Substack. Let’s put it out there up front: both are free. Both are pretty widely known, because they each spend a lot of money on marketing. There is a reason and method for this, and it’s not quite in the best interest of creators or consumers:

• Mailchimp is owned by Intuit, the same company that makes TurboTax and has lobbied for years to make it nearly impossible to file US tax returns – a basic civic duty — for free. They are a perfect example of a company where you are the product: many of their services are “free”, but cluttered with ads and sketchy, dark patterns to coerce you into upgrading or signing up for financial services that ultimately add risk and complexity to your life. The money they make on these dark patterns & lobbying is used to market their free offerings, like Mailchimp (and Credit Karma I guess? Long live Mint.com), which feed more folks into the cycle of dark patterns, treating them as leads to purchase services thus affording Intuit even more money to spend on lobbying and marketing.
  
• Substack is a social network masquerading as a newsletter platform for “thoughtful” writing & podcasting. As with any social network, the only way to survive is to relentlessly grow, even if that means giving a platform to Nazis and taking millions in funding from right-wing technocrats to grow & market the platform to hyper-scale because there is no path otherwise to profitability from “democratizing” the bulk sending of emails anytime you want to publish something. Not to mention that once you get a small-ish following of paid subscribers, you lose significantly more of your earnings to their platform fees compared to alternatives.

If I were a creator with a somewhat progressive code of ethics (and many I know seem to be), I would not use either of these platforms. So what to use instead? You’ve got options. First, you’ve got alternatives. A quick rundown:

• Buttondown – in my opinion, the best all-around for small creators and artists. Privately & independently owned by one guy named Justin who cares a lot about transparency, good customer service, and making a really simple and reliable service. It’s also free for your first 100 subscribers, then $90/year should pretty much be all most independent artists need. Buttondown is what I use.
  
• Ghost – Ghost sort of looks like a Wordpress or Substack alternative without a free option. Their cheapest plan is $108/year, but you get an excellent and reliable blogging & newsletter service with beautiful template options. They are independently run and funded, and your paid subscriber funds their ability to continue maintaining the platform and building features that help you. The incentives run different — unlike Substack, whose recommendation engine is meant to keep creators on the Substack platform, Ghost’s recommendations service helps readers find other writers to subscribe directly to, to help grow those writers’ audience and give them a reason to keep writing on their Ghost-hosted site.
  
• Beehiiv – A solid option if you’re looking for something very “Substack-like” but with less sketchy social-networkness and better financial incentives. Instead of losing 10% for every paid subscriber, you pay $34/month (minimum) and keep the subscriber revenue. The bigger your audience, the more it’s worth it.
  
• Kit (fka ConvertKit) – a more conventional email marketing solution that is independently run and has a quite generous free offering. I immediately recommend it over Mailchimp or most other conventional email marketing toolkits, if you want something more like a conventional “mailing list”.

This is all great, but with it all said: I’m also not convinced that everyone having a newsletter is sustainable. If everyone has a newsletter, then everyone’s email inbox becomes even more overrun with emails than they already are. I think blogging is due for a comeback, and RSS may be a more flexible alternative that more creators can and should be relying on. I’m going to explore this more.

please please please listen to my newest single I’m begging

My next single “please please please listen to me I’m begging” - is out on Bandcamp today.

This is an older song of mine — it dates back to 2012 or so, and was intended as the lead single for a previous solo project of mine. An even earlier version of it was something I explored for the original concept album project that evolved over the years into my last album RUINED CASTLE. Needless to say this one has a place in my brain/heart.

It’s mostly instrumental, jagged and desperate. It shares DNA with “when I sleep”. I was originally inspired by the writings of noted conspiracy theorist Francis E. Dec when composing it, and it sort of reflected (at the time) some of my early thoughts around social media and one’s desperate need for attention on such platforms. That sentiment has only become even more prevalent in daily life.

The Bandcamp version also contains 2 extras: the originally intended intro to the song (“rant”), and an excellent house remix from the producer BP dating back to 2014.

My bandcamp strategy for 2025

Bandcamp recently announced their Bandcamp Friday schedule for 2025. I’m honestly just happy this is still a thing at all; Songtradr (Bandcamp’s owner) could easily have shut it down after they laid off half the Bandcamp staff upon acquisition. But they seem to want to keep the goodwill of their artist community (thankfully), so we still get this nice thing — even if it’s not all year round.

As a reminder, Bandcamp Friday is a day on which Bandcamp waives its normally 15% revenue cut – instead, if someone buys your music or merch on a Bandcamp Friday, all the money (other than credit card fees, usually 3-4%) go to you, the artist. If you don’t want to read their blurb, here are the Bandcamp Friday dates worth remembering in 2025:

• February 7 (This is not technically a Bandcamp Friday, but they’re donating their revenue share to California wildfire relief, which is admirable and important)
  
• March 7
  
• May 2
  
• August 1
  
• September 5
  
• October 3
  
• December 5

My plan for Bandcamp Fridays

As I wrote last year, I (got lucky and) backed into a strategy that somewhat worked for me, combining:

• A backlog of music I could trickle out over the course of the year
  
• Intentionally-timed big releases lining up with Bandcamp Fridays
  
• Finding good causes to donate Bandcamp Friday proceeds
  
• Promoting all of this organically, almost entirely on Threads

I think I can largely repeat this in 2025, with a few tweaks.

Incorporate Bluesky & Reddit as promotional channels. I still have a decently large (for me) audience on Threads, but I also see the platform waning a bit as a place to cultivate community. The recent policy changes and the imminent introduction of ads feel icky but more importantly mean that Threads will become (to a degree) a place where the loudest and richest capture the most attention. Reddit still seems like a place for healthy discourse (I think?) and most of my music contacts have migrated to Bluesky.

Slow it down. I was releasing something every 2 weeks in 2024. This was really exciting and I think helped me amass my audience quickly, but it came at the expense of my exhaustion. And I suspect my small audience may have gotten tired of me a bit. I want to try releasing less frequently on Bandcamp, perhaps monthly, and focus most of my “promo” on this cadence. I’ll still release to streaming services, but I’ve found that almost no value has come from focusing my promo on the streaming releases (without paying for ads, which I have an aversion to for increasing reasons).

Milk my previous work. I released 3 full-length albums in 18 months. This was awesome but probably overkill and not a realistic pace to keep up. I have a few singles I may put out this year, but 2025 may be best suited for some companion releases building on those 3 albums in a new way.

• I put out an album of piano music last year, and I am keen to do more of these. This has been a great way to test an even shorter record-to-release timeframe (I can record solo piano music quite easily) and mix tons of different source material into a cohesive work.
  
• I also commissioned a compilation of covers of some of my songs made by indie artists I’ve met online. I loved the experience of making this, and I’m keen to do similar things projects again. The last one was covers — the next one will be an album of remixes.
  
• I had so much fun covering my buddies Death Waits, and I have a few ideas for covers of other artist friendlies of mine. This could make for either a few single releases or a covers EP – I’ve got options!

All of this allows me to have a consistent set of releases and not commit to a full-length album. I’m buying myself time.

Here’s what I’m thinking for 2025: Have something to release the first (or second) Friday of each month. Not everything warrants a Bandcamp release, but at least have something for the Bandcamp Fridays. Every other month can be for trickling out releases to streaming. Here’s a current sketch:

• Jan 10: “empty me” (death waits cover) single release
  
• Feb 7: “please please please listen to me I’m begging” single release
  
• Mar 7: the LP3 remix album
  
• Throughout March & April: trickle out LP3 remixes to the streaming services
  
• May 2: a new piano music collection
  
• May through July: trickle out piano music and outstanding remixes to the streaming services
  
• Aug 1: perhaps another cover single
  
• Sep 5: new original single
  
• Oct 3: some kind of EP release
  
• Throughout October and November: trickle out the EP to streaming
  
• Dec 5: holiday single???

I hope this inspires some ideas for you, fellow struggling independent musicians!

On purpose

I’ve spent a lot of the last 3 weeks thinking about Ethel Cain’s latest release, Perverts. It’s an enthralling and intoxicating listen (subject matter notwithstanding). This album represents to me the power of music — that, outside the bounds of capitalism, music can abstractly express an idea or feeling so powerfully in a way that cannot be achieved by words themselves. This album has purpose – to express and explore perversion in a way that popular music cannot allow. Almost nobody with a record deal does this without huge risks, and almost no music released by major record labels has a purpose beyond brand loyalty and profit.

Most of the music I’ve released has been pent up for years, sitting on hard drives due to impostor syndrome. This music has always felt purposeful to me, and only more so since I’ve finally released it – it’s collectively a time capsule chronicling my development as a human being and partner, which I personally feel even more deeply than my listener because of the time it’s taken for these 3 albums I’ve released to be “done”. I see this project as purposeful – as a reflection and heightening of the emotional rollercoaster that is being part of an incredibly intelligent and deeply aware but somehow still “lost” generation.

Also: I’m slowing down my music release schedule a bit in 2025 and going to try my hand again — for the third time – at maintaining a biweekly newsletter.

Nerding out with Buttondown’s now-free API

I made a li’l Apple Shortcut to publish any writing to a Buttondown email list, thanks to their API being free now.

Now I can write my blog posts in my writing tool of choice (IA Writer for those who care), publish it, and immediately after send it to my subscribers, rather than a bunch of extra steps or waiting on RSS feeds. This is very unnecessary but very fun and saves me time.

How it works:

1. Set up a email newsletter for free on Buttondown
   
2. Get your API key from the Settings page, and copy/paste it somewhere
   
3. Get this shortcut I made
   
4. Open the shortcut and, when asked, paste in the API key
   
5. Write something in your Notes app or whatever
   
6. When you’re happy with what you’ve written, go to the share menu, and choose “Buttondown Draft”
   
7. It’ll open up your post in the Buttondown editor for you to once-over and then send to your subscribers

Kid Lightbulbs self-review, 2024 edition

Every so often in a corporate environment you are subjected to a performance review, and a common part of this process is the self-review. For much of my career I loathed having to write about myself, but now that I’m 36 and my body is starting to literally fall apart, I’m feeling a bit more reflective. (Everyone sharing their Spotify Wrapped / Apple Music Replay findings a few weeks ago also got me into reflection mode, too, although I agree with most people that the Spotify version was pretty underwhelming this year, and more so when you realize it was due to layoffs.)

And so I am sharing my self-review of everything I accomplished as a musician this year.

This is a big deal for me to even write at all because, despite being technically a musician for almost my entire life¹, outside of a few years in a previous band, I never took music seriously enough to justify writing something like an “end of year reflection.” It was always just a side thing I did to scratch an itch, to gain some sense of creative fulfillment using a craft & format I seemed good at. I didn’t set any goals for this year. I just put myself out there to see what happened, and then reacted and reflected as I saw things happen.

What I accomplished this year

(I wrote a version of the following on Threads a few weeks ago, I’ve updated it a bit.)

I’m not gonna focus on the Spotify Wrapped stuff, because that’s not what I’m proud of in 2024. Literally 65% of the plays & listeners are from botted playlists so the numbers don’t mean much of anything to me beyond the fact that they are greater than zero. Which is basically where they were in late 2023.

In addition to that, I somehow accomplished all this in 2024 too:

• I got out of my creative shell and figured out how to talk about my music and myself as an “artist”, and people from all over the world are talking with me about it all
  
• I finished & put out an album I’ve sat on for 10 years (STEP INTO THE OCEAN), & finished another one I’d sat on for 6 years (RUINED CASTLE). A few people have said that each of these are among their favorite releases of 2024.
  
• I impulsively made a piano music album and people liked it, such that I now plan to make more piano music
  
• I collaborated with some great folks here on some remixes & an entire covers album
  
• I proved that my music has value via $1100 $1350 in Bandcamp sales
  
• I went on tour with my friends in Earthside, reaffirming my love for both live performance and playing bass (and the fact that I can still do both, if I’m honest)
  
• I made and sold some merch! (Kid Lightbulbs t-shirts)
  
• Someone wrote a poem inspired by lyrics I wrote!
  
• I got some true fans: 13 Spotify folks have me as a top 10 artist + 6 folks subscribed on Bandcamp to support my stuff on a recurring basis with real money
  
• I received some of the kindest compliments about my music and my ideas as a musician from other artists I respect.

This is wild to me. Stuff like this is what matters more than any listener or play count. I’m grateful for all of it.

(photo credit: roaming roach photography)

What I’ve learned

There are more than 8 billion people alive right now, and more than 5 billion of them have internet access.

This is a really pretentious way for me to introduce the idea that I’ve learned that niches not only exist, but have potential to be hugely important in music. You don’t need to worry at all about appealing to the vast majority of people. You only really need a few thousand true fans, maybe even less. The idea of 1,000 true fans isn’t new — but I think that, given the extreme over-saturation of all music across all high-level genres, it benefits most independent artists (or at least “alternative” ones) to really invest in finding the small niche of fans that love their stuff and want to dig deeper instead of seeking broader appeal. And with the size of the internet-ready populace, that may not actually be too hard to achieve with the right framing and strategy.

I haven’t landed my strategy in full yet, but I’ve done a few things that I’ve landed on and tried to share what’s worked (and not worked) for me. Because I’ve also learned that not nearly enough folks in music are transparent enough with their knowledge and insights. Gatekeeping still is everywhere in 2024, even among supposedly fellow small independent artists. We all need to be more transparent – not just Spotify, not just the major labels, each and every one of us. If anyone wants serious change in the industry or the tech companies increasingly running it, we benefit each other & ourselves by sharing everything we know that both is and isn’t working. Everything from your Spotify metrics (in full) to the obscure knowledge you’ve built that may be useful to an artist. And the more of us that succeed, the larger a voice we collectively have.

Above all: there is zero agreement among musicians on what success looks like, and therefore there is no single goal or strategy that unquestionably works for everyone. And it’s extremely empowering once you accept that and just start doing what feels right to you.

Kid Lightbulbs in 2025

I don’t have any major specific goals for my music in 2025. I’ve found that I don’t handle concrete goals well for this part of my life because (1) I have very limited time to work on it, and (2) Kid Lightbulbs is inherently a passion project of mine and creating undue pressure takes the passion out.

That said, I have a set of principles I want to keep sticking to, and a rough list of things I’d like to say I’ve done by the end of 2025:

• Play at least one live show as myself / Kid Lightbulbs. I’ve finally found a few local open mics and communities thanks to some helpful folks on Threads. I would love to make a full-on band for this, but I’d be happy even just playing a solo set with an acoustic guitar or digital piano.
  
• Release physical versions of my first 3 albums. I am currently testing a vinyl process via Elastic Stage, which would unlock single LP and CD releases. I’ll aim for simple vinyl LPs and deluxe CD editions.
  
• Release another set of piano music. This will be easy, because I have one ready to release — just need to decide when to release it (likely on a Bandcamp Friday).
  
• Collaborate more. I’m already signed up to remix one track and produce/arrange another, each for different artists I’ve met online. I’d like to also keep making covers of independent artists I like, building on the Death Waits cover I’m releasing in early January.
  
• Make significant progress on a fourth album. I’ve already got musical ideas for roughly a full length album and about 5 songs’ worth of lyrics already. (Some may even argue that this is already significant progress 🤪 )
  
• Decide once and for all on PR and commit. I try to keep Kid Lightbulbs cost-neutral, but 2025 may be the year where I am willing to put some money into promoting the project and/or getting help with making promo content, something I struggle with a lot (especially video). Given how busy I am in work and in life, and how much early (small) hype Kid Lightbulbs has, I suspect that it may be the time to invest in a little help here to keep my momentum going.
  
• Write a lot more. I’ve been frustrated with short-form social media for a while — video continues to both elude me & shift to mediocre e-commerce, and short-form text social is quickly devolving into echo chambers and rage-bait, even on platforms intended to be reprieves from this. That all said: I have gotten so much fulfillment out of expressing my thoughts in longer form (such as this here post), and these longer-form explorations seem to be resonating quite well with folks online. So aside from my above musical aspirations, I want to get more ideas out into the world as prose. I think this may be a more important contribution to the independent music community than my music itself.

I’ve said it before: I am very busy. I’m hoping that this is not too much for me – especially since I’m already deep at work on some of these things.

Overall I’m absolutely blown away at what happened to me creatively in 2024. I am insanely grateful for the attention I’ve gotten and the friends I’ve made along the way (I know this is a silly thing to say but I mean it genuinely). I don’t expect the same for 2025, but I am at the very least excited to keep this going.

Accepting the Spotify “problem”

I am coming to a grand unified point of view about Spotify. The purpose of this post is to present it, so that I never have to talk about Spotify again.

If you want to skip to the good stuff and move on, here’s a short summary:

1. There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
   
2. Streaming in general is not viable as a primary revenue source for musicians; do not think of it as one.
   
3. It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around for a long time.
   
4. It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.

Okay now for a rant:

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Spotify much in the last few weeks, but I’m also extremely tired of having to think about Spotify. It seems to constantly pop up in my social feeds. It’s regularly talked about in both tech and music news. The company is everywhere. It’s been the elephant in the music room for years now.

Most recently it became profitable, mostly through multiple layoff rounds, de-monetizing 80+% of the music listened to on its platform, and continued investment in sourcing other content (like audiobooks, podcasts & production library music made by “ghost artists”) to offset the share of listening done by its users of music requiring a royalty payment.

None of these developments are good for smaller independent artists. No doubt. It’s infuriating as a musician who cares a lot about his craft.

But also nobody should be surprised by any of this. Artists living in a late-stage capitalist society (ie. basically all living artists) need to accept that Spotify is not for them. This is a for-profit business whose biggest cost source is royalty payments to artists. The only ones they cannot avoid are major-label artists, due to the outsized influence of the 3 major labels (oh and Tencent Holdings, the massive Chinese conglomerate, which has a stake in both Spotify, Warner Music Group, and (full disclosure) Epic Games which formerly owned Bandcamp). Therefore, it is not a surprise that the labels and Spotify peacefully coexist in a rat-king of entangled investments, including from private equity.

Spotify, like most publicly traded companies, is designed to be in service of its shareholders (including major labels & private equity, which are minority shareholders per the above point) first, and its revenue sources second (in this case, customers & advertisers). It never has been and never will be in the service of independent music. The only musicians it will serve are those represented by Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner Music Group, who represent the collective majority of music revenue but a tiny percentage of the actual musicians in the world. It is not viable for Spotify as a business to support the rest of the world’s musicians, because they’ve played a massive role in cheapening and commoditizing music, packaging the entire catalog of recorded music into a nice $10 $15 monthly subscription.

You could argue that other streaming services are slightly more in service of independent musicians – particularly YouTube seems to be the most friendly in terms of tooling / network effects, and a few offer better payouts – but most of the other streaming services are a side revenue stream for a much larger tech conglomerate, which means it’s lightly invested into at best, and the artist is usually the last to be invested in. Apple is happy to keep bankrolling Apple Music as long as everyone keeps buying their phones at a massive premium and naturally upgrading to an Apple-owned services bundle which includes Apple Music¹.

Also, none of these other services have the market share to yield a decent payout, and even if they did, the payout would not be enough to sustain the cost of living for the vast majority of artists.

Spotify does not have the luxury of being a subsidiary of a larger tech conglomerate, which is why it’s unsurprising that they invest in podcast, audiobook, “ghost artist” music and now user-generated video content. The ironic thing about this is that, as J Herskowitz put so eloquently on Threads, each of these involve “real musicians getting paid to make music.” Think about it: audiobooks & podcasts need intro music. Where do they get it? From a production library service. Where does the library get its music from? Either on-staff composers or by licensing music made by others. Spotify is now licensing that music directly, because it turns out many casual music listeners can’t distinguish between lo-fi chill beats made by a ghostwriter artist and, like, Boards Of Canada.

Things that “real artists” do not like about Spotify are almost certainly legal, and in many cases great for consumers. Assuming, for example, that Spotify is not actually paying itself royalties for stock music libraries it’s licensing and putting on its popular playlists (and even if they are indirectly, there are loopholes to make this possible), this is entirely legal and not unlike Amazon buying cheap products in bulk, white-labeling and selling them as low-cost alternatives under the “Amazon Basics” brand. We’ve all bought from that brand before.

It is also extremely unlikely that independent artists will form a union together to stand up to Spotify, because artists are fickle and we’d never have enough swing because Universal Music Group commands more music playback than all independent artists combined.

And as much as I don’t love this reality, Spotify is the most widely used streaming platform and arguably the easiest way for most people to find and stream my music. As much as I loathe aspects of their business model (the free tier relentlessly destroyed with ads, the heavy weighting of major label and cheap audio content in their interfaces & algorithms), they do have solid AI and editorial playlists and the best music app in many ways for most people. As much as fellow independent artists complain about Spotify, a massively high percentage of my fellow independent artists use Spotify to listen to music. I’ve literally had multiple public conversations on platforms like Threads and Bluesky inviting real fans of my music to listen to a Bandcamp exclusive, only to have them tell me they’ll wait for the streaming release — and then listen to it on Spotify two weeks later. (I don’t say this to complain, but to reinforce the point about the convenience of streaming and point out the hypocrisy of it.)

This reality does not stop me from promoting the formats and platforms I prefer – which is why I occasionally do advance & exclusive releases on Bandcamp. However, what happens when a fan I’ve earned decides they want to listen to Kid Lightbulbs, and can’t because they lost the link I shared and my music is hidden from their easiest way to listen to music? It is a disservice to my potential audience to not have my music on a service like Spotify.

So that leaves the question of whether Spotify can work for me in light of the frustrating points. Does it help me grow my audience? I’m not sure that it does. It’s helping me maintain an audience I seem to be building on my own in other places like Threads & Bandcamp & (maybe a bit) YouTube, and giving me opportunities to maybe snag a few listeners here and there, but none of them seem to translate into fans without me actively promoting myself via my channels.

The ways I see independent artists trying to “grow” on Spotify don’t seem viable at all. You can play their ads game, which is not affordable for most artists; you can buy into a “growth service” which is almost certainly using farms of smartphones run by robots to generate fake plays and listeners. To organically “market yourself” on Spotify is to be constantly pitching to playlist curators, which range from Spotify itself to your friend’s dad, many of which are gatekept through “vetting” services like Submithub, Musosoup and Groover. You can do this, but it rarely pans out. I have spent probably $300 on promotions this year via these platforms and have effectively nothing to show for it beyond a few flattering reviews, some (not all!) actually going into some depth, which have yielded almost no new listeners. In fact the most successful press I’ve gotten is from one review I landed via a mutual Threads connection, and word-of-mouth.

If music is so deeply oversaturated, and the average playlister is a random online content creator focused on vibes instead of taste and critical analysis, of course the average small artist is going to be rejected from almost any playlist and for no constructive reason.

Occasionally you do get lucky – and suddenly notice 15 concurrent listeners listening to your stuff on a Saturday evening, which in theory sounds exciting! – but more likely than not these are scams simply looking to either take your money or terrorize you as an artist. Enter Chartmob, Wavr.ai and the countless other bot playlist scam companies. Many artists I know have run into these, but if you’re unfamiliar: these are services that offer “growth on Spotify” by “guaranteeing” a massive increase in plays and listenership. They do this by adding your music to one of their playlists and using a massive farm of smartphones to shuffle that playlist on infinite repeat for some specified period of time (3-7 days, usually), despite insisting that “these are real fans!” with no way to contact them to ask for more information on those supposed fans or how it works.

I’ve gotten “placed” on one of these playlists, outside my control, 3 times in the past year. (They also randomly scrape songs from indie artists for their playlists, as a bizarre form of sales lead generation I guess.) While one of those times triggered a bit of a Spotify algorithm boost for an obscure piano piece of mine (“into the bay”), though didn’t actually yield me any new followers or consistent listeners. The other two did nothing but throw off my Spotify metrics for a month. It’s now the end of 2024 and I’m basically where I’ve been most of this year, as far as listeners and weekly streams go.

This is my listeners chart for the last 4 weeks. A song of mine (“things I might say to you”, a collaboration with Badyears) got scraped for a Chartmob playlist, and suddenly got almost exactly 1,000 players over 72 hours. I got nothing out of this as an artist other than a to-do to report Chartmob to Spotify, and my “monthly listener” count now looks artificially high until roughly January 4, after which it will likely return to measly low-triple-digits.

I’ve also seen small artists band together to make their own playlists to “help each other grow.” Enter what I’ve been calling the “community playlist extortion” strategy. The idea - I think - is a classic word-of-mouth playbook which also, if executed well, triggers the Spotify algorithm to take note of the increased attention to the playlist, and boost the artists on it:

• Someone makes a playlist that vaguely follows a theme and invites a bunch of current and potential musician friends to feature a song on it
  
• That person asks every participant to regularly play the playlist, and/or promote the playlist to encourage a few new listeners outside the circle of musician friends
  
• Time passes; some percentage of the participants and their followers listen to the playlist for some amount of time

I’ve done a couple of these. They never achieve the goal. Participants forget or bail. Listeners forget. The vibe/theme of the playlist is contrived and therefore the playlist isn’t tightly focused. Most of the listeners of the playlist are friends of the artists and therefore don’t actually help anyone’s audience grow at all. And so nothing happens and we move on.

I’m not convinced at this point that there is a viable playbook for building an audience on a streaming service, without either paying lots of money to manufacture one (and this is likely not a sustainable or even real audience), or by coming to streaming with an audience you built elsewhere.

• Streaming has given everyone access to the entire catalog of recorded music. Listeners have always been fickle with regard to their music preferences, and are arguably more so now given the overabundance of listening options they have. An extremely small percentage of them notice the artist making the music they like.
  
• The incentives of streaming services are aligned with consumers, not suppliers (artists/creators of music). The enshittification theory explains how, and I think the why is simple: because in Spotify’s case, retention of paid subscribers (listeners) is how they make money.
  
• Therefore, artists are forced to be in service of the streaming service, not themselves, and unless they have enough influence on their own to drive a successful business relationship with a company like Spotify, there’s no happy path to achieving one.

It has me wondering what the goal of “building an audience” online really is for a musician, and how we define success here. What kind of audience? How big? Is it to be discovered? If we talk about “being discovered”, by whom? The industry?

It feels often like the ones who talk about this are the ones who are either (1) industry people or (2) artists who were discovered, either by a large fan base or record label, often before the current phase of music & technology in which Spotify, TikTok and Instagram dominate how music is heard. I haven’t done this research, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the growth of follower & listener counts among smaller independent artists has flattened over the last 5-10 years. (The data is publicly available to determine this). There are obviously exceptions, but I suspect many of those exceptions are either now signed to a major or meaningful indie record label (based on a following they were cultivating elsewhere), or artists who paid for some artificial growth of these numbers in order to “legitimize” themselves.

And when I talk to these artists, they often hustled for years and shelled out massive amounts of money, and caught a wave before this period began. Some of my best friends are now in the echelon of artists where they can make some money each month on streaming – and they largely attribute their success to working extremely hard (in a nearly full-time capacity) and being excellent at their craft, putting tons of money and time into investing in and promoting themselves, and catching a wave of significant Facebook and YouTube growth before TikTok blew up.

I would argue I’ve honed my craft over nearly 20 years of consistently composing & producing music, but I don’t have the time or money to either buy a lot of PR or get good at video so I can ride a TikTok wave, which I’ve likely already missed, and short of a viral sensation I don’t see a way through this unless I put far more money into this operation or try something wholly different. (Maybe I’ll catch a long-form writing wave, who knows?)

Here is my grand unified point of view about Spotify as a small independent artist in our current era of music. This may not work or make sense for everyone, but it comes from some deep reflection on the points above.

These are the 4 components:

1. There are exactly 2 ways Spotify can be useful to small indie artists: (1) as an unpredictable marketing channel, and (2) as a barometer for your audience growth achieved in other ways. It is not something to “work on” outside of occasional marketing activities.
   
2. Streaming in general is not viable as a primary source of income for most musicians building an audience post-2018; do not think of it as one.
   
3. It is not worth my time as an independent artist to fight for or expect Spotify’s downfall; expect it and the streaming model generally to stick around.
   
4. It is respectful to a potential listener to have your music on Spotify or any possible place where music can be heard; not doing so is a missed opportunity to find a potential fan.

At the highest level, we need to stop talking about Spotify as if it is something to proactively work on as a small artist. Yes, the industry seems to care a lot about the vanity metrics it puts out (monthly listeners, plays, etc.), but I suspect this is to reinforce the influence of the major labels. These are not metrics that we independent artists should strive to grow on their own. Instead, these should be a reflection – the result — of promotion activities we do elsewhere: PR pushes, new music releases, building a social presence, cultivating a brand/image, creating & promoting other media, playing shows, surprising fans and potential fans.

You can get lucky with Spotify, if a song of yours gets on a special playlist that causes your listenership to (temporarily) skyrocket, which may trigger some perks from the algorithm. But I am not convinced this is a repeatable activity you can drive as a smaller artist. The bigger and longer-tenured artists (thanks to label support, heavy PR and money) dominate any meaningful editorial playlists, and most other playlists don’t generate enough meaningful listenership to drive any sort of audience growth because most Spotify users simply use the options the algorithm sends them. Neither listener habits nor black-box algorithms are in our control, so we need to stop acting like they are.

You can also choose to take your music of Spotify in protest, but I wouldn’t. I think it’s disrespectful and a form of gatekeeping, but more pragmatically it’s a missed opportunity to gain a repeat listener by forcing that listener to find your music somewhere else if it’s less convenient for them.

So the streaming service serves as your back catalog, a reflection of your work as an artist and therefore the audience who wants to listen to that work. You can leverage features like Release Radar to notify your existing listeners about new releases, try to get on some good playlists, and hope that a few prospective listeners will catch them across those placements. But at the end of the day this serves as unpredictable, low-touch marketing of you, the artist, where your song is the marketing asset.

To end this very long rant: I just think we need to worry about Spotify a lot less and let it do its capitalist thing. We can both make more impact as artists, and inspire real change in listener habits and the art form of music generally, by focusing on other things. Like Bandcamp. And organic connection with potential fans on social platforms & elsewhere. And playing shows. And touring. And merch. And generally making more art and putting it out into the world. And other innovative offerings that we haven’t come up with yet, but we will because we’re creative people who do the music thing because we need to do the music thing.