Tinkering with the internet in pursuit of creative independence.
Internet DIY: My own music selling mechanism
Three weeks ago I laid out some background on why I care about staying independent as an online-first musician, and the principles I’ll try to stick to in doing so. Now I’ll go a bit deeper on one of my DIY explorations: selling my music directly to people who want to buy it.
I have set this up on kidlightbulbs.com, such that viewers can buy any of my music from me directly – not on Bandcamp or the iTunes Store or at a record shop, but via a payment link that I control and from which I receive all the buyer’s money (less processing fees, which are basically unavoidable if you want to accept credit cards). I don’t need to hand 15% of it to a third party. At my tiny scale, this is insignificant, but at a certain scale it means a lot of money the artist does not get for their work.
Background
Back in my late teens, I was in a weird instrumental prog rock band. We built a decent following in southern Connecticut as a niche act. We formed in 2004 - CD burning technology (and piracy generally) was already pretty widespread, but streaming hadn’t come around yet. We also had no idea what other bands were doing to make, promote, distribute their music, so we just tried a bunch of stuff — like burning our poor-quality demos to a CD, slapping together some ridiculous artwork in my mom’s copy of Microsoft Publisher, printing them on my inkjet printer at home, assembling a few CD packages, and selling them for $5 at shows. And we sold some! Between that and simply playing shows and talking with folks before and after said shows, we build this small following that allowed us to open for some national touring (albeit obscure) acts like Fish (from the band Marillion), Starship (fka Jefferson Starship), and The Machine (a noteworthy Pink Floyd tribute band). We also got some press and were offered a management contract at one point– not because we had our stuff played on radio or had a certain number of followers on MySpace and Facebook at the time, but because people were talking about our stuff IRL.
IRL stuff obviously happens still, but overwhelming what matters is online social proof. Yes, you can get press, radio play, and so on, but most artists gain a meaningful following through painstaking, neverending content marketing to push Spotify plays, getting lucky with a viral TikTok video, or being born into money or a recording industry family. Even if you do, unless you are Taylor Swift (and basically only that), you don’t make a sustainable living doing so. We weren’t making meaningful cash as a local New Haven band, but we did make a tiny bit of money on these burned CD sales, t-shirts, and so on – and if the industry hadn’t changed, and we kept at it, it’s possible we could have. Now it simply seems impossible… unless there’s another way.
I like to tinker with websites, always have. I never formally learned how to code but would mess around with services like WordPress and Drupal just to see what I could do with them. Working with software engineers for the last 15 years, I’ve gradually picked up concepts and know-how that has gotten me slightly better at this (or at least awareness of what is possible on the Internet with very little effort).
In the last year, a lot of things happened that ultimately led to me caring about the value of my music:
- I lost a job during a brutal tech job market, which had me exploring myriad other ways of making money while I looked for my next job
- I met a bunch of great musicians (many of which I’d call friends now!) all challenging & lifting each other up to elevate our art and the attention it’s getting
- Bandcamp, arguably the last holdout music platform working in support of independent musicians, got sold again, and then gutted half its staff
- Spotify cut its royalty payouts for all artists generating less than 1,000 streams per song per year, funneling those funds instead to (mostly) major-label artists
On that last one: from a business strategy standpoint, I understand why Spotify changed its royalty mechanics. I’d make pennies for the few hundred streams some of my songs are getting; it was never a viable source of income other than for the extremely successful 0.001% of musicians. But the gesture makes clear the painful reality of streaming: It is for consumers first, suppliers (artists) second, and unless you are in the extreme upper minority of the supplier base, you basically cannot make money in this model. Therefore, I no longer think of Spotify as a source of royalty revenue, but rather a sometimes-predictable marketing channel for my music and the Kid Lightbulbs brand.
Somewhere in the middle of this (in early April ’24), Pharrell decided to release his new album Virginia: Black Yacht Rock Vol. 1 on a random website with no press or gimmicks – you can go there right now and stream or download the whole album for free, with an option to provide your email address.
This is ballsy, but Pharrell can afford to do it. It’s also not the first instance of this – Radiohead did this in 2007 with In Rainbows (introducing the “name your price” model for music sales), and plenty of artists have gradually offered other ways of supporting their craft since then thanks to platforms like Bandcamp and Patreon.
Each of those platforms takes a fee. Again, this makes sense: Bandcamp offers infrastructure that many musicians can’t fathom managing themselves. But in 2024, it’s increasingly easy to set up much of this infrastructure on one’s own, using platforms that everyone (including listeners) already uses. So I did. Turns out it’s actually quite possible to sell your (digital) music without any of those big platforms claiming to be the best or only way to do so.
And if you have even a small base of fans willing to invest, they’ll buy from you – I’ve made nearly $500 on pre-orders alone for my second album (STEP INTO THE OCEAN), about 10% of which came through direct sales on my website. The rest came through Bandcamp, which is fine for now and I promoted heavily, but the fact that I generated more than $0 in money from a website I fully control is interesting.
A quick warning
Before I actually get into any of this, I want to lay out a few disclaimers because there is a fair amount of risk involved with the approach I took. I don’t think I recommend the specific approach I took to anyone unwilling to experiment or understanding the flaws, which I will document throughout this writeup. In a lot of ways, the approach I took does resemble the rough process of burning a CD, printing an inkjet album cover, and slapping it together oneself - but early fans are willing to work with that. I also personally believe that a good fan puts value in the art they’re buying, far more than the distribution method. A set of MP3s is a set of MP3s, no matter how they arrive in your inbox.
How I did it
Here is a list of every tool and service I used to set this all up:
- Stripe, the online payments platform - 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction
- Dropbox as the file storage and distribution mechanism - $9/month (or free if you don’t need a lot of storage space). You can also use Mega.nz, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or basically any cloud storage provider to do this.
- Song.link to dynamically offer links to stream my music anywhere the listener wants - free
- Buttondown, an “headless” email newsletter service - free for up to 100 subscribers, otherwise $9/mo starting price
I could also count Blot, the service I’m using to power this site, but it’s technically not necessary unless you are also writing a blog online. You can spin up a site on a number of services for free or cheaply, buy a domain for $10, and point the domain to that site. I recommend Carrd for this, or a free link-in-bio service like Buffer’s Start Page1.
Chances are, if you use Patreon, Ko-fi or even Bandcamp, you’re familiar with Stripe (or PayPal in the case of Bandcamp album purchases). These platforms also use Stripe to power their payment processing. When someone buys your music or merch on Bandcamp, you lose both Bandcamp’s cut (10-15%) and a payment processing fee to Stripe or PayPal.
Here’s a fun thing about Stripe: They actually have a number of no-code, incredibly consumer friendly services that allow you to take payments online in a great, trustworthy user experience, both for you and the patron.
The piece that’s missing from Stripe is distribution. Distribution is hard; I would absolutely not want to take on distribution of physical merch in some DIY fashion. (I know I could, but I also don’t want stacks of Kid Lightbulbs t-shirts sitting in my basement or the burden of having to package and ship them out.)
Digital distribution, while hard, is a lot easier in 2024. Secure file hosting solutions abound, and some have great solutions for securely sharing large sets of files, like an album of songs in multiple formats with artwork and liner notes. I chose Dropbox because it (mostly) aligns with my values, is super reliable, and even has file access monitoring and password protection on files if I wanted to really lock down this process.
How it works in practice
I need a way to easily share the finished album with people who bought it from me – so, here’s the process as it stands today:
- Someone goes to kidlightbulbs.com and wants to buy an album of mine
- They click on the “Buy direct link” and are taken to a checkout page hosted by Stripe
- They pay however they like
- They get an email confirmation, and so do I
- As soon as I get that confirmation of payment, I simply send the buyer a templated email with a Dropbox link to download the album
Simple as that. It’s like I burned you a CD and emailed it to you.
What if someone emails you in the middle of the night? Currently, they’ll need to wait until I see their email the following morning. This isn’t ideal, but I am pretty sure I can embed the Dropbox link into the payment confirmation email itself, so the buyer can download it immediately after paying.
Does the email look sketchy/unprofessional? I don’t personally think so, because I wrote a concise, grammatically correct and somewhat personalized emial that thanks the user again for buying my music. I’ve had a few people buy direct from me, and they’ve said it’s been great!
Setup process
1) Compress your album/song/whatever, along with its cover art, into a .zip file. On macOS, you can easily do this by selecting all the files, control-clicking, and choosing “Compress.” You can also do this on Windows.
I’d recommend including your music in multiple formats — at least WAV and MP3 — so the buyer has the best quality audio you can send them.
2) Build yourself a simple artist site. I recommend Carrd, Blot, Wordpress or Ghost for this.
This is key. The social networks, Linktrees, and a lot of “artist profiles” block stuff like taking your own payments, or heavily limit what you can do, and many of them have policies allowing them to take down your site or profile without warning, are likely to raise prices due to their incentives to grow or profit massively, or just go away as the tech landscape continues to change. The services I recommend are simple, reliable, powerful and don’t (seem to) have those problems.
Even if you want to stop here because your music is just fine on Bandcamp and Spotify and whatnot, you should have a website that you control. If you are an independent artist and are struggling to figure this out, email me and I will help you.
3) Create a Stripe account & verify yourself. Once you do, you’ll have access to a big dashboard. It looks intimidating and like it was built for software developers — which it originally was! — but there are some quite easy-to-use and (dare I say) fun features in here we’ll dive into.
4) Create your “products” in Stripe (ie. any album, single, or other thing you’d want to sell) and set their prices.
- Click on “Product catalog” on the left side.
- Click on “Add product”.
- Fill out some basic information on the album, single, etc. you’re looking to sell. You can set a fixed price, or click on “More pricing options” to enable name-your-own pricing if you like!
5) For each product, create something called a Payment Link. This is basically the thing you embed on your website to allow visitors to buy from you. You can create one for any price point that you want to sell your products for.
- Find and click on the “Create payment link” button.
- Click the “Buy button” option. (There is also an option to get a simple link, but it’s more work to get it looking nice.)
- Customize to your liking. There are two different designs (I prefer the simple button), and you can customize the text and color of it.
- Click “Save changes and copy code.” This gives you an embed code to place on your site.
6) Put the Payment Link embed code onto your website. Knowing where to paste it depends on your site builder you chose and how exactly you want it to look. Here are a few tips:
- If you went with Carrd, they have an “Embed” block, which allows you to put code into a special block that looks nice and contained around the other elements on your site.
- On Ghost or **Wordpress, you can include an “Embed” block on a specific page of your site in that page’s editor.
- Blot allows you to write whole pages of your site in Markdown, and you can paste the embed code directly into a page’s markdown file. (This is what I did for kidlightbulbs.com.)
In the end, it could look something like this:
And now you can sell your music directly to fans, on a site you fully control without having to pay out a platform fee.
Other future enhancements or fun ideas to try
**
Add purchasers to your email list automatically
Got an email newsletter? Your email newsletter service probably has an integration with a service called Zapier, which is a cool automation service with a free option. You can build an automation that grabs the email from someone who’s purchased, and add them to your mailing list. (Make sure either (1) you ask the user in the Stripe settings if they want to opt into emails from you, or (2) your newsletter service sends that person an opt-in confirmation, otherwise you just subscribed someone to an email list without their consent 😬)
Broadcast to your social channels every time (or every day) someone buys
You can set this up with the aforementioned Zapier workflow that triggers upon a purchase, and have it also publish a social post through a service like Buffer.
Discounts / coupons
Stripe makes it somewhat easy to spin up discounted pricing if you want to run a sale for a limited time. You can do this by going to your product listing(s) in Stripe, hitting Edit Product, then adding a new price you can set as the Default.
You can also set up Coupons if you’d rather run a sale that way, or offer something exclusively to your fans/patrons at a discount.
I’m not sure if this is worth the effort it took to figure it out. But it’s very nice to know that there is technology to DIY my online selling of music.
Disclaimer: I am employed by Buffer as of this writing.↩︎
Announcing album 2: STEP INTO THE OCEAN
I can’t believe I’m now at a point where I can share this: my second album is called STEP INTO THE OCEAN and preorders are now open for it.
It’s 13 tracks and 54 minutes long. A decade in the making. Somehow it’s both an exercise in restraint and an unapologetic alternative rock sprawl. The five singles I’ve released in 2024 are on it, and 8 more tracks to complete the journey.
It’ll be released on Friday May 17. The evening prior, I’ll be hosting a little listening party on Bandcamp – RSVP here.
If you want to listen to it, you have options:
Alternatively, preorder it from me directly for $12 (no platform fees ftw).
If you don’t want to spend 💵, no worries! It will be on streaming services in early June.
Getting unstuck in time
Much of this album took form in 2013-2014, during a period where my now-wife and I decided to move in together, then relocate to New York City, only to “come home” after 10 months due to a job change and a visceral feeling of isolation. It was during this period where our relationship was tested for the first time, and I produced a lot of music as a result. This period had me revisiting ideas from years prior to that, even – “trendsetters” has elements dating back to 2009, “curiosity” lifts from a solo piano piece I wrote in 2008 for a school project, “belly” was originally intended for a collaborative project with my friend Tess back in 2011. I intended to put out this material as an album called Bedtime Rituals (with “ritual” sort of functioning as a title track and centerpiece). I spent months getting this album to sound the way I wanted, never quite getting there.
Then life got in the way and this album basically sat on a hard drive. I got deeply involved with the job I took “back home” in Boston and music took a major back seat. I would occasionally have and record an idea, compile those into albums and quietly “release” them on the internet with no promotion whatsoever, and basically nobody heard them as a result. These songs were occasional reflections on my relationships, impostor syndrome, capitalism, the like. In early 2019 I had put together an album called Sleepwalker under the alias Sophomores (which contained an early version of “forget everything” - another song dating back several years), which I intended to use to revitalize an experimental pop act, only to find out that the young girl from Little Miss Sunshine (who was now an adult woman) had announced her debut single “Sleepwalking” from her new project Sophomore. I saw this as a sign to step away from music for a bit.
In 2019, after abandoning Sophomores and with life fully in the way, I changed jobs and needed to go to San Francisco for a new-job-onboarding thing. My wife & I made it into a little trip, rented a car & drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. We’d never been to places like Big Sur and it was wonderful. One of the beaches there had these weird wood structures all over that looked like small tents that one might rest in before taking a dive into the ocean. Somehow decrepit & meticulous & harrowing & exciting at once. She took a picture of one.
In late 2023, I kicked off the Kid Lightbulbs project with my first album Throw myself into the bay. Some people on the internet seemed to really like it, which honestly caught me by total surprise and boosted my confidence immensely. I started revisiting my older audio sessions and realized that I have at least 3 full albums of material just sitting here, much of which is pretty good!
I dusted off the old Bedtime Rituals sessions, starting with “trendsetters”, only to immediately realize that these songs had taken on new meaning in the decade since originally recording. Originally “trendsetters” was about losing my edge against younger hipsters making differently interesting music – now it’s simply about getting older. “ritual” was about the comfort of my relationship during a hard time – now it’s about the fact that my wife and I always return to each other no matter what chaos life is throwing at us. ”She’s too good for me” (a song I have yet to release) is as relevant as ever.
STEP INTO THE OCEAN is about the uncomfortable acceptance of a life with complexity. It’s about getting older and still having love but being okay with its warts. It bizarrely emerged as a sequel to my more urgent and abrasive first album (both in themes and title); where Throw myself into the bay needed to get out of my system, I feel I can handle and thrive in the feelings of this second album for a while.
I hope folks enjoy this thing as much as I do.
Some guiding principles for creative independence
Over the past few months I’ve been quite energized by the ideas of online independence and transparency, both as a tech person and a musician. This has been inspired by a few recent developments:
- My working for Buffer, a company who continues to double-down on remaining independent, transparent, small and sustainably profitable
- My budding interest in the fediverse, decentralized Internet protocols, and related concepts
- The news that Bandcamp, a platform championing independent musicians, was acquired by Epic Games (the Fortnite company), then sold to Songtradr, then gutted of half its staff
- My discovery of Faircamp, a self-hosted alternative to Bandcamp built by Simon Repp
- The recent increase of Spotify’s investment into in algorithmic, rather than editorial, playlists
- My increased attention toward Threads, the new Meta social platform, on which I’ve successfully started building an audience
These are just a few of many related ideas converging on two facts:
- The Internet is rapidly becoming a chaotic mess run by a small set of very large companies optimizing for shareholder value and thus uninterested in investments to tame said chaos for the good of humanity;
- Opportunities still exist for thoughtful organic connection online, amidst (or away from) this chaos, and there is growing demand for and willingness to search for it
Oddly enough, Meta (of all companies) is straddling a very fine line between those two mindsets thanks to the introduction of Threads and long-term support for concepts like open-sourcing and the Fediverse.
Some context
As a musician, for years I struggled with having the confidence of promoting my work — partly due to impostor syndrome — but also because it’s felt like somehow both a Sisyphean and Kafkaesque task to market oneself online. There are the conventional routes of music promotion: play shows, submit to press outlets for coverage, hire publicist/agent/manager/etc., which is full of scammers and bias and dead ends. Then there’s the Internet platforms, which theoretically level the playing field between bedroom novice musicians and major-label acts, but in practice are a relentless game of constant attention-seeking and algorithm-pleasing. Not to mention that the “conventional” industry is also playing those same Internet games, often with money to influence the outcome of the games. And scammers. And now AI-generated garbage.
Not to mention that the music I make - highly personal, a bit sprawling and unconventional rock music and stuff that I’d consider “art” - is not what’s in demand in the general public.
But in the past 4 months I’ve found a niche: fellow musicians or independent music appreciators on Threads. It’s a small niche, but my presence within it is growing, and I have (small) data showing that. People in that niche have paid me real money for my creative output.
This means a lot. Not just to me personally - I am extremely grateful, flattered, and a bit bewildered that people would pay me for my music!!! - but in terms of what it opens up for potential methods of building my musical work (or any musical work) into a small sustainable project on its own. My goal is not to turn this into a full time job, but I would love to be able to gain a small but supportive audience of folks who value my creative output and be willing to financially support it in some way, because I believe that good art deserves market value.
This is not a new idea. Fan support platforms like Patreon and Bandcamp have existed for over a decade. But they are platforms funded by venture capitalists or large corporations, and even so are very much outliers in a music industry dominated by Spotify – a large and highly unprofitable business — and the major record labels, who partly bankroll Spotify for their own gain. Most people who listen to music have never even heard of these other platforms, let alone support an artist on them.
Moreover, as Spotify leans more and more into shuffled algorithmic playlists, the music that most people will listen to are (1) massive viral hits or (2) music specifically produced to optimize placement in the algorithm. And if I think about the listening habits of most non-musicians I know, they likely don’t care. Most of them don’t care or even realize who made the songs Spotify feeds them. This is definitely not good for artists, and I’m not sure it’s good for the world.
So I feel compelled to look elsewhere, and in a way that does not further entrench platforms incentivized to relentlessly grow at the expense of art & artists. I want to be unapologetically independent and thrive in doing so.
What’s my goal here?
It’s not to tear down the platforms. I’m not on some war against Bandcamp since it got acquired then sold then gutted.
It’s much more about three things:
- A strong conviction that there is some demand for my art, and I can leverage my knowledge of tech and business to turn that into some kind of sustainable side income
- A deep-rooted interest in wanting to own my brand & presence on the internet and the relationship with my supporters, driven likely by a passion for DIY & punk ethos
- Having redundancy in case the music distribution platforms do collapse or decline in importance
Guiding principles
- The primary goal is creative freedom above all else, across all aspects of my creative work (including branding)
- Minimize money given to services/platforms misaligned with my values
- Minimize service lock-in
- Must be low cost/time to maintain
- Wide upper funnel (distribution) to maximize reach, narrow lower funnel (purchase) to maximize profit & fan connection
- Strength in numbers: support & collaborate with similarly-minded artists & service providers
That last one is tricky. There are two big hairy problems: payment processing and file distribution. If you want to make money on your music, you need to accept payment methods your potential customers have, and then deliver the music (sometimes in multiple formats) to them in some way. What services like Bandcamp and Spotify do is complex.
But there are alternatives if you begin to think about it differently. Why not just email a paying customer a .zip file with my album in it? Or a Dropbox link? Or a link to a file that I host on a server managed by a business I trust?
I’ve always been fascinated by local markets and the DIY ethos. The idea that, to keep costs low and ownership high, you keep things simple, organic, and in your control. These principles help my process feel truer to DIY but online.
Applying this to my web presence
I’ve already begun applying these principles to how I maintain my presence on the Internet and how I conduct myself.
My website (kidlightbulbs.com) is built with Blot, a simple $5/month service run by one guy named David that turns a Dropbox folder (or Git repository for the nerds) into a functioning blog. I write text, throw it in a folder, and it shows up. That might even be how you’re reading this right now. David runs the whole thing himself with seemingly no funding or support, shares a public record of features he’s considering, and openly invites his users to provide feedback.
My newsletter is hosted on Buttondown, a free (or inexpensive) newsletter service run by a guy named Justin. It’s completely independently and sustainably run, and Justin shares exactly what he’s doing and using to run the service. He (or his 1 support person) respond to my questions in under 3 hours every time. It’s wild.
I get analytics for my site via Counter, a free (donation-based) and open-source service run by a guy named Irae in Berlin. It’s awesome and all you really need for “website analytics.”
Music distribution is hard to do in alignment with these values, and something for which I am actively exploring options. Distribution to the streaming services is particularly tricky – however, I’ve begun to think of this less as an essential service and more as a marketing expense, and therefore I’m willing to eschew my values a bit to make this happen.
I currently host and distribute my music via 3 services:
- Bandcamp, where I host my full albums and my current patron subscription offering
- LANDR, which takes my releases and distributes them to the various streaming services like Spotify (I’m currently phasing out my subscription with Distrokid, a more well-known but increasingly sketchy service that is also partly bankrolled by Spotify, which as a reminder is partly bankrolled by the major record labels)
- Dropbox, my cloud storage solution of choice
Yes, Dropbox is publicly traded and therefore incentivized to prioritize shareholders of users; however, I strongly align with several of their values including great user experience design and remote/flexible work. Basically, far less evil than Google and far more reliable than other offerings I’ve tried.
LANDR has raised 9 rounds of venture funding, and likely is incentivized to grow rapidly. However, their interface design is by far the best of all distribution services I’ve tried (Distrokid, Tunecore, Symphonic, and Unchained Music are the others). It’s probably silly, but good simple design matters a lot to me. I don’t have a lot of time to fight against what’s essentially a form to fill out anytime I want to release music (every 2-4 weeks). That plus (from what I hear) great customer service is worth the little extra they charge.
Bandcamp is interesting because they are one of the last holdouts in the music industry championing independent music, rather than reverting to the least common denominator of what’s popular. I am cautiously optimistic about their future, though their rough 2023 and the increasingly cutthroat tech landscape leaves me wanting an out if I need it. Fortunately, Bandcamp allows you to easily download all your albums and even your followers’ emails so you can easily move them elsewhere.
In future posts I’ll dig more into the experiments I’m doing around
- direct financial support,
- offering flexible listening options to my (tiny but growing) audience, and
- promoting on the social networks and the Fediverse
Listening to Earthside’s “Watching the Earth Sink” half asleep on a morning flight
I found myself listening to the new Earthside album, Let the Truth Speak, for the first time at around 6am at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport while waiting for a 7am flight home. I was coming off a work trip that was overall great, but I cannot overstate how exhausted I was — operating on 3 hours sleep after a week full of intense planning and debating and team-building, lugging a carry-on, juggling overpriced egg sandwich and burnt coffee in hands. I missed my family and my bed. My brain was exhausted from the past week but still swimming with thoughts, and I needed to slow it down. It probably was not wise for me to listen to a 78-minute progressive metal album under these conditions.
“Watching the Earth Sink” (track 5 of 10) began just before my boarding group was called up. For the next twelve minutes, I daydreamed one of the most vivid daydreams I’ve had in my life, which followed me from the airport waiting area, into the Airbus A220, into my seat, into the faces and tiny windows surrounding me. In my half-asleep stupor I thought the world might be tearing itself apart around me, exacting vengeance for our endless societal wrongdoings and forcing me to watch helplessly from my aisle seat.
This song is not for everyone. It’s progressive metal, which is already a much-maligned genre overfilled with tropes. It’s nearly 12 minutes in length. There are reportedly 29 separate guitar performances on this song. Even some diehard metal fans don’t care for it, one reviewer calling it “exhausting” with a “careful build-up, only to unceremoniously wipe it off the floor with a predictable post-metal jaunt whose single trick is to be heavy.”
I disagree. I’m not sure if “Watching the Earth Sink” is my favorite song of 2023, but I think it’s a song deserving special attention and analysis. It’s meticulous in its construction. It moves the progressive metal genre forward. It’s one that requires multiple listens and (if I’m honest) benefits from some kind of sleep or sensory deprivation to appreciate it fully. Consider listening when you’re alone, driving through empty forest roads in the dark, or perhaps when you’re half asleep and feeling down while stuck at an airport, people watching.
Earthside themselves describe “Watching the Earth Sink” as “an instrumental narrative told from the perspective of an onlooker to the current state of the world—one who feels disconnected from the warring powers that be, left to simply bear witness to calamities they feel helpless to prevent.” You feel all of this over the 12 minutes of the piece. You feel it after sitting with the title alone. It’s perfect in its bleakness. It implies passivity — you’re helpless to do anything but watch as the Earth is sinking around you. Just sinking. Not exploding or imploding, not tearing apart like an earthquake. A sinkhole. Slowly and gradually fading out of view, probably unnoticeable except for the bubbling earthen muck. Perhaps sinking to baser, perfectly human instincts, lashing out at the inhabitants that care too little to take care of it or themselves.
I’re read a few reviews of Let The Truth Speak which rave about this song, some of which specifically call out guitarist Jamie van Dyck’s solo in the introductory section of “Watching” as sweet and calming. Someone likened it to floating down a river.
Nope. Not even close. This song kicks off in utter devastation. Like the mood after a funeral1, it’s grim, beyond somber. Clean tone and dense reverb may imply “calming vibes,” but Jamie (guitarist, composer and friend) plays as if he’s suffering an existential crisis, stumbling out of tempo and in somber defeat. Jamie oscillates slowly in my earbuds between D minor to B- flat minor, two of the saddest chords in Western music. In my half- asleep stupor at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport, I am there with him as I glance at televisions spouting horrifying news about the Gaza crisis while twenty- and thirty-somethings stare at laptops and smartphones and the more neurotic travelers cut each other in line for a plane not yet ready for boarding. Nothing is good.
Until carefully voiced chords breathe and meander upwards, pivoting to inversions of D major then to a less bleak G minor, suggesting a cautious way forward. The guitar continues its musing as I oscillate between people-watching and my iPhone. It feels pointless to try to understand anymore as the guitar settles into an E minor to lydian E-flat, as if it’s second guessing itself.
My boarding group is called. My cautious optimism is complemented by a meditative ostinato at one minute, fifty-three seconds. Played in unison by Ryan’s bass guitar and an ethereal bell-sounding synth from Frank on keyboards, defeat turns to surrealist wonder in 23/16. I appreciate that this section has no discernible melody or solo; it’s driven by mood and movement. It’s difficult to keep the pulse, but it almost doesn’t matter because things are looking up: I’m finally almost on my plane, it’s not overly crowded, the guitar has found solace in dense Lydian chords and arpeggios if only for a few moments. Even after the arpeggios abruptly cut, the ostinato continues for four bars. We’re still okay. The Earth has yet to sink.
The ostinato is suddenly, but only partially, replaced by militant clicks on the snare drum and driving root notes on the bass. Frank keeps wandering in twenty-three, occasionally embellishing on the core, while the rest of the band shifts to a tense 4/4. But you can’t really tell: the juxtaposition of increased pace with slow root movement in the bass makes it even more difficult than before to find the pulse. I feel uneasy. I’m stopped in the aisle as I wait for passengers ahead of me frantically search for overhead space.
At 4:11: a jump scare.
The bass guitar tone suddenly shifts on an up beat to overdrive and I don’t see it coming. I haven’t had this happen while listening to music in years. We’re now unapologetically in 4/4 and it feels like something is careening toward disaster. I come to my senses and look out the window and I imagine Florida buildings in the distance starting to collapse as a crack in the Earth forms and spreads toward the airport tarmac. The floor of the plan is vibrating under my feet. The ground splitting in the distance, out of which a massive earthen hand rises up, preparing to grab the plane and tear it in two.
Four minutes and forty-five seconds, the tense rhythmic build abruptly explodes into a brutal, direct 3/4. Drop B flat guitars, kicks and cymbals each pummel your listener in unison for exactly 19 repetitions until shifting to C sharp on an upbeat, continuing the feeling of the music shifting below your feet when you least expect. The use of harmonic minor scale here combined with the intentional chord movement on upbeats really exemplifies sinister chaos. The plane is taking off and in my head it’s moving as fast as it can to avoid the earthen behemoth careening into the side of it. Frank’s synthesizer screams faintly in a distant corner of the mix, possibly echoing my own internalized panic. This is quickly overtaken by demonic orchestral hits2 that follow the chord movements in synch with the other instruments, as if to suggest it’s now useless to panic. Suffering is inevitable now.
But by minute seven, a reprieve. We’re well in the air as the destruction unfolds below. While the plane flies safely and normally, I feel an uncertainty punctuated by the pivot to the key of A, the dominant chord of the song’s D minor root. It’s rare to hear such a simple chord change in progressive metal, where rhythmic and harmonic complexity abound. Ryan’s bass arpeggiates 7ths and 9th chords as they change from A to G to E flat, finally returning to the root, perfectly simulating my unease. Jamie leads the way with a confident melody, and it almost alleviates the feeling.
At 8:12 I am in a haze as everything fades away but a descending keyboard line. It’s as if there are embers and ash dancing around; the heavy use of major 7ths in this otherwise epically bleak song are equal parts playful and ominous. Eventually all the instrumentalists join the dance, with performances that evoke a desperate last stand. Jamie’s guitar wails with desperation as Ben majestically slams on every tom in his kit. After a few bars the bass and a deeper guitar take over with a sinister riff, mostly playing root notes again – almost an homage to the earlier devastating section, D harmonic minor and all, reminding me there’s more destruction to be had. It’s coming.
Once bass and guitar reach for a deep baritone A, we’re in a nose dive. This is doom metal. There’s no more hope. I’m pulled down into the depths. A once-playful melody has been mangled into something evil by a wicked cabal of guitars. The drum kit reaches escape velocity over sixteen bars.
And then it…just stops. There’s no resolution, no final word. I am left hanging just above the abyss.
It was a pretty normal flight in reality. I landed at Logan Airport in Boston on time, and got home to my wife, kid and dog a little over an hour later. But during the early minutes of said flight I experienced something visceral, gripping, devastating.
It’s quite rare nowadays that music — and music alone – can achieve that.
It’s not lost on me that the final words of the preceding track “Pattern of Rebirth” are: life comes and goes, life↩︎
If I’m honest: this is the one part of the song I feel could be stronger. The orchestral hits feel just cliché enough where it actually took me a bit out of the experience until 7 minutes in, once the hazy bridge section begins.↩︎
On platform incentives & supporting indies
I used to have a Substack, but I don’t really like spending time on Substack, and I don’t write frequently enough to justify that kind of a commitment from supporters of mine.
They also now have clarified their policy on censorship, and it’s one that clarifies their dependence on venture capital and desire to grow and profit above foster healthy discourse (at least to me).
I’ve been feeling a pull to get “off Substack” because I don’t fit the vibe. More importantly, I don’t feel great about my writing being there and I don’t have the stamina to write frequently enough to survive in the dynamics of a platform like that, where frequent engagement and name yields results.
Coincidentally, Bandcamp (one of the services that hosts my music) is going through its own mess of a different nature rooted in the same incentives: money and growth. So I’m not sure about its long-term viability.
Working for Buffer has really bolstered my support for the value of independence – the notion that independence allows a business to stay true to its values. This goes for both myself and the businesses I choose to rely on.
So why do I rely on services run by folks who are directly incentivized to adhere to values that aren’t aligned with mine?
My new place on the Internet
I’ve got a new, simpler, chiller website now too. Now that I work at a bootstrapped startup that has & exhibits values of transparency, reflection and optimism, I’ve reflected a lot on my own usage of the Internet and internet products. I’m increasingly frustrated with the state of venture capital and large social & entertainment platforms (which isn’t great given I need to promote music right now lolz), and I’ve found myself wanting to divest from these things where it makes sense.
- My website is now built on Blot, an extremely simple and powerful service that spins up a fully managed site & blog for you using text files in a (private) Dropbox folder. (Blot also supports Git-based syncing, which I’m considering as an alternative to Dropbox, which is also a publicly traded company.)
- My newsletter is now hosted on Buttondown, a (free to start!) newsletter service built & managed by one dude named Justin.
- My music is currently available on all the major streaming services, but I primarily promote my music via Bandcamp because it’s where you can support me directly. Fun fact: last year, Bandcamp was acquired by the company that makes Fortnite, which is super weird. There’s nowhere really better than it though, other than maybe hosting it myself.
This is something I’ll continue to explore and probably write about.
THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY is out now
Listen or buy on Bandcamp, Spotify or Apple Music
I’ve been quietly working on this album for the past 3 years and I’m thrilled (and a little freaked out) about sharing it publicly. It’s a sort-of rock opera chronicling the adventures of an anxious person (possibly me?) over the past 3 years of pandemic, polarization & reflection on what matters.
Support me directly by buying it on Bandcamp, or stream it anywhere you listen to music.
I plan to write more in the upcoming weeks on the making of this album, some of its influences, the origins of some ideas (some of which date back to my teenage years!).
Tools stack (mid-2023)
This is the stuff I use to do things.
Hardware
- MacBook Pro 14-inch w/ M2 Max
- iPhone 14 Pro
- AirPods Pro
- Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface
- Tascam DR-40X field recorder
- Yamaha P-115 digital piano
- Schecter Stiletto Studio 5-string bass
- G&L L-1000 bass
- PRS SE Custom 24 electric guitar
- MXL 990/991 condenser mics
- Sony MDR-7506 reference headphones
- Blue Snowball mic for calls & podcasting
Software
- Ulysses for idea capture & long-form writing
- Apple Mail for email
- Apple Messages, Slack & Zoom for communication
- Apple Calendar, Reminders & Notes for notes & planning
- Apple Music for music snobbery
- Apple News+ & Reeder for reading & bookmarking
- Overcast for podcasts
- Safari for web browsing
Services
- iCloud Drive for personal storage
- Dropbox for collaborative storage & hosting this site
- Blot for managing this site
- Buttondown for my newsletter
- Bandcamp for hosting my music
- Backblaze for backups
- Namecheap for domains
- Tidycal for scheduling
- Buffer for social media publishing1
- Logic Pro for music production
- Reason 11 for drum machines & samplers
- GarageBand iOS for jotting musical ideas down
- Figma for ad-hoc design
- Pixelmator Pro for occasional photo editing
Disclaimer: I’m employed by Buffer.↩︎
Liberal arts and the jobs of 2030
Why artists & curators will win the AI revolution
The timing of the AI boom alongside the laying-off of over a million people, mostly in tech companies, feels suspect to me.
Sure, the main reasons for the Big Tech Belt Tightening seeming to be a mix of “economic uncertainty,” badly placed bets, shareholder appeasement and an attempt to reassert dominance over those workers outstanding. But I find it interesting — and possibly not coincidental — that, as the media loses its mind over AI coming to take everyone’s jobs (including their own), companies are openly questioning how many humans are required to generate revenue.
And as every company becomes a software company, and AI subsequently eats their software, I can’t help but assume that the biggest platform owners (Microsoft/OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple) — which mostly happen to be the ones driving the development of underlying AI capabilities and frameworks – see this writing on the wall and are trimming humans they’re certain will be eventually superfluous. Why does Microsoft need all these engineers, PMs and designers, marketers and recruiters if Microsoft’s own Copilot will simply do half the work for them? Could they do with only the best half of them? Why give them benefits if they’re only doing half the work they used to do?
In other words, the time of throwing people at technology problems is coming to an end. That means significantly less staff required to build & run tech companies, and (maybe) those staff members getting more paid.
That also likely means fewer startups with open roles — simply because “founders” won’t need dozens of coders, customer service agents, or even designers to build and scale an idea. Sure, plenty of startups (especially around AI capabilities) are hiring and attempting to exploit the spoils of big-tech layoffs, but 95% of those won’t last.
I’m including my own field of work. Product management will probably not be obsolete within the next 5-10 years (software development will go faster and more decidedly), but significant parts of the everyday will be. The whole deal with product is that you are the creative leaders in an organization, but it’s becoming obvious that what works as great design is quite predictable, and the majority of PM tasks are repetitive. Sure, we can be “creative strategy drivers” or whatever, but at one point or another,
Sure, tech as an industry isn’t going away, as long as fuck-you-rich people (VCs or not) have money to throw at problems they care about - but with millions of people out of work, seemingly for months and possibly forever without seriously considering their options, I can’t help but feel that it’s no longer viable, especially for young people, to simply assume you can work in tech. Not even high performers are safe (especially not managers), if they’ve found themselves stuck on the losing end of a political in-fight or unviable business strategy. Instead, it will be for a select few who have aligned themselves very closely and successfully with those fuck-you-rich leaders.
Leah Tharin had a great post a few weeks ago about the “innovation arms race” happening in product:
https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7053351636282269696” height=“1225” width=“504” frameborder=“0” allowfullscreen=“” title=“Embedded post”>
This innovation-centric “back to basics” going to start happening in every industry. SaaS will consolidate around a few key services requiring humans and otherwise become obsolete as AIs perform the work for executives. Radio stations are already replacing human DJs and ad copy with AI-generated shows and ads. Food service will need to innovate as restaurant space is more expensive to rent, and eventually AI will be good enough to know what food someone wants, orchestrate a kitchen full of robots to make it consistently to one’s liking, and deliver it quickly. Medical doctors will be forced compete with AIs that are experts in all fields of medicine at once, drawing correlations between systems of the human body to quickly diagnose conditions any single doctor would need weeks to wrap their head around. (Note: I think this last one warrants much further explanation given the nature and cost of healthcare in the United States.)
Not all jobs in these sectors will be eliminated, but the niches best suited for humans will reduce and become increasingly focused on creation & collaboration with a mix of humans and robots. Doctors may be truly better at bedside manner and running tests because of physical properties of humans, but their specialties will matter less because an AI will be doing most of the diagnosing.
The self-employment renaissance
The past few months of 2023 made a few things incredibly clear to me, separate (but again related) to the AI proliferation:
- More people than ever are starting their own businesses, often on the Internet. This wasn’t new – COVID really kicked this off – but it doesn’t seem to have slowed down.
- A significant portion of those businesses seem to involve teaching or sharing incredibly niche expertise via a premium product or service.
- Everyone doing this has no choice to be good at sales, marketing and reputation management in order to succeed, because of the increase in visibly self-employed people. (That said: it wouldn’t surprise me if, by sometime next year, an AI product existed that did your marketing & reputation for you, continuously optimizing for audience growth.)
As AI starts to wipe out many entire fields of work and significantly cut the scope of others, I expect more and more people will explore the self-employment path simply out of necessity. (I’m doing it between trying to write this!)
The four (or five) “lucrative jobs” of 2030
Every once in a while I see an article about the highest paid / most lucrative jobs of that year. I think a lot of those jobs on this year’s list will be gone by 2030.
Instead, I foresee four main “jobs” emerging (and a possible fifth) as the big ones most people will aspire to do. These are intentionally broadly defined and not prescriptive of a type of employment, but more about the essential work involved with each job. Three of them have become increasingly commonplace as the Internet has enabled cheaper, broader distribution of information, and are essentially based in a liberal arts education.They are:
1. Artist
Those creating the <2% of art & media not created by AIs, selling at an extremely high premium to (mostly) the higher-income classes of society, though some will likely find support in Kickstarter- and Patreon-like crowdfunding models.
What remains of Hollywood, the fiction and music industries fall into this bucket – but the majority of these artists will be selling their NIL (names, images & likenesses) as their primary sources of income and occasionally make original art.
2. Teacher/coach:
those selling their experience as a product or service, mainly sub-niches within the arts, sales, business management and AI whispering. Coaches in particular sell at a high premium and differentiate from AI coaches used by the masses. Conventional American education is slowly dying. 11% of US children were homeschooled in 2021, a 3x increase from 2019 (mostly thanks to COVID, which also exposed myriad other problems with the public school system).
Online teachers & coaches – the influencers of the Internet selling courses around incredibly niche topics like monetizing LinkedIn, “small bets” entrepreneurship and health coaching (three topics of which my spouse and I have paid real money for courses) – will come to dominate as the way humans learn skills necessary to make a living.
I expect that, over time, younger people will seek education from these Internet-based teachers, eschewing traditional high school for learning specialized skills that matter in the midcentury economy. And why shouldn’t they, given the wild success stories of the teachers and influencers all over the Internet?
3. Curator
Those paid to sell & recommend products and services to the masses, mostly by AI-led corporations but also a mix of human-generated products, services and content. Most of today’s “content creators” likely fall into this bucket.
This job already exists; it’s a subset of what we call influencers, YouTubers, content creators. Dror Poleg had an excellent musing on AI’s effect on social classes, in which he wrote this:
But consumption will serve a critical economic function: It will not just buy the stuff that people make; it will help make that stuff better and figure out what to make more of.
Most of the stuff we consume is not necessary. More precisely, it does not provide objective value. When I buy a pair of Nikes instead of Adidas, I buy them because, subjectively, I like one pair more than the other. And when I buy hiking shoes, I do not buy them due to a technical need to go hiking but because I think they’d look cool on my walk to the coffee shop.
Curators are the people who guide on what to consume, and how to consume it.
4. Subverter
Those attempting to game the AI systems or subvert increasingly homogenous social norms for pay (eg. Hackers, sex workers, escorts/companions, AI manipulators).
Given that our future society will likely be run by complex systems we don’t fully understand (even if there are very rich people running the businesses that own the complex systems), there will be even more incentive to try and game those systems for two reasons:
Gaming the system is inherently fun and engrossing. Just look at any fandom around a complex video game or TV/cinematic universe, even going back to the early 2000s. (Anyone still think about the show Lost? I do.) When Bing 2.0 came out, the Internet lost its mind trying to get it to transform into Sydney or Riley or Venom. When Microsoft “corrected” Bing, the fun was decidedly over.
In a world with fewer high-level occupations to choose from, many people will become desperate to stay financially afloat without the support of government-sponsored programs. And crime, or subverting the rules, can be a compelling way to find stability.
Most of the people doing the above jobs will be solopreneurs; some will have big paydays selling their winning products to the large AI-first firms to absorb into the larger AI offerings. For instance, a human teacher who develops the best course for learning how to sell an educational course on impressionist painting may sell the rights to that course to Alphabet Inc., who will integrate it into Bard v6.
The possible fifth lucrative job is Maintenance: the people keeping the complex AI systems and platforms society uses to drift along running. I consider it possible but not likely, because I expect that other complex AI systems will exist solely to maintain the AI systems interacted with and used by humans. AIs maintaining AIs. We see rudimentary forms of this today, with continuous software integration & deployment, automated software testing, and even code writing tools like GitHub Copilot — software that can check and improve upon itself.
Other jobs that likely exist but aren’t considered as “hot” may include: scientists (who advance human knowledge forward but continue to be largely ignored by the masses outside of pointed significant discoveries), nurses / medical technicians (who largely offer bedside support and administer tests as recommended by AI), taxi drivers (because self-driving may still not be a thing by 2030).
Don’t worry, liberal arts majors — your time to shine will come soon.
#future
© 2024 brandon lucas green