A Musician's Thoughts on Spotify...

Tales from the Goose that Bumps

I have been writing songs my whole life but it’s hard to say “professionally.” Technically, I met that threshold in my twenties but the bar for “professional” is much lower than minimum wage. Lyrics are the mother of poetry and children make more money on the street. Birds taught man how to sing long before any words were considered.

I am jarue369. This is an update on my musical distribution journey. I stopped actively posting new songs to Spotify around May 25th. It's hard to say where I will go in the future, but I thought others might be interested to see the results.

Firstly I have sought much advice from the industry. I have summarized that advice so we can review together. Here is the gist of what I did wrong and why:

1. it was a bad idea to post a new song every day.

2. I need to post about songs before they are released and wait 30 days between each new release. I need to tease you 29 out of every 30 days to keep your attention.

3. With over 40 tracks under my belt, it would require several years to share my work with anybody.

I don’t know how anyone could be motivated to make more music with this strategy and that much backlog.

So I went against this advice in April, and decided to post a new song every day. As much as I'd like to believe Spotify is an organic market for new music, these tactics reveal the true nature of the industry and I don’t have the humility to put that much hype into the matrix and dilute all of my real work with spam about something coming in the future. I came here to show, not tell. If i tried it the other way, production would grind to a halt as I wait an entire moon for nothing but an algorithm whose purpose is to stifle production.

Overall, things are going pretty well. This chart shows the results of posting a new song every day to Spotify (via DistroKid). The last song I posted was May 28th. I imagine their algorithm will continue to slowly forget me but it is taking longer than I expected.

What surprises me most is my online sales of digital downloads and CDs. I never would have considered this an option but I have managed to pre-sell enough to produce my second album. I am still in the red, but a profit will come if I stay around long enough to catch it.

Musicians don’t produce albums, listeners do. The music industry hides this truth. The industry that gave you Miley Cyrus is finally complaining about slop but I question its motivation. AI shows culture its own work. The look in the mirror allows us to critique what humans do more honestly. Calling something “AI slop” is calling the millions of trainings it scanned “slop,” too.

AI is regurgitative, not creative. Calling things “AI slop” is admitting the industry’s output that trained AI was never really working.

I have a new theory that “viral” is bad. Viral content proves a monopoly. It shows the algorithm is flawed and purposely prohibits the exercise of diversity. Viral proves the game is rigged. The word “viral” proves this is caused by a kind of sickness. The White Sun shows us the industry has always been trying to fold the hose and limit the industry to a drip. Tunes are dropped, not poured. The gushing has been sequestered.

If these industries were clean, there wouldn’t be a casting couch or a Puff Daddy lotion ring. Music would be local. It would be more like the craft beer industry. These changes are coming. It takes a while to convince people to believe in the good things coming.

Thank you for listening to jarue369 and for helping me produce two albums! I couldn't be happier and already consider my offerings a huge success. I don’t have a lot of faith this is going anywhere. I am convinced the joy of it all is found in the beat.

Dream States is my latest album.