02021-04-16 | Uncategorized
A little math for a Friday morning. :-)
I sell my albums for $9 on Bandcamp. This is a good and fair price point, I think. For those of us who prefer high definition files it is a very good deal, because digital vendors of hi def albums will usually charge around $16 per album, and often more. You own the music in the file form you prefer and you can download a booklet in the form of a PDF.
Let’s look at the streaming equivalent. Apple pays $0.0056 per stream. Google is not far below that at $0.0055. Spotify pays $0.0032 per stream.
If you buy my album on Bandcamp you are giving me the equivalent of streaming an entire album of ten tracks 163 times on Google music or a massive 281 times on Spotify. There are very few albums I have listened to, in their entirety, nearly 300 times. Listening to an entire album once a week it would take you five and half years to listen 281 times. Listening to the album once a month it will take over 23 years.
This does not illustrate how expensive an album is to buy, but merely how ludicrously low streaming rates are. It’s great to be able to access so much music through a streaming subscription and I use such a subscription myself. Knowing what the streaming rates are I make a point of buying the music I love. I even tracked down a CD of the album “Dokunmak” by the brilliant Turkish fretless guitarist Erkan Ogur.
A big thank you to everyone who buys my music on Bandcamp. You will always get the best quality and I will always release new music to Bandcamp many months BEFORE it appears on streaming services.
02021-04-15 | Uncategorized
COVID-19 leads to a several-times higher risk of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) blood clots than current COVID-19 vaccines. Researchers at the University of Oxford have today reported that the risk of the rare blood clotting known as cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) following COVID-19 infection is around 100 times greater than normal, several times higher than it is post-vaccination or following influenza.
Source
02021-04-15 | Uncategorized
The spelling has already been corrected. I am pleased with the distributor, UnitedMasters.
Spent some time this morning looking for my In-Ear-Monitors. Looked everywhere I could think of. Opened drawers, looked through bags. May 29 is not that far away, I thought. Cycled through three rooms several times. At last I went into my garage and opened my suitcase, where I don’t keep the IEMs when I travel. One side of the suitcase was empty and I felt disheartened. Then I opened the other side. There was a bunch of stuff – like silk for repairing nails, for example. And underneath all of that was the case for the IEMs. I pulled them out and tested them. They worked. All is well.
02021-04-14 | Uncategorized
Here is the link to the work in progress.
Yesterday afternoon, in the studio, I worked on “Bare Wood 2”. Three songs from “Fete”, four songs from “vision 2020”, and four brand new pieces, all fashioned only from the bare wood: flamenco guitar, acoustic upright bass, cajon and djembe. I especially love how the new pieces are turning out, but all of the album sounds good to me.
I love the freedom of going from a big sounding record like “Fete” or “vision 2020 (full version)” to something like “Bare Wood 2”. And next to “slow 2” or “one guitar two” or something altogether different, sprouting from the piece that is the music for the incense video.
Now for something more serious. I think the CDC is making a huge mistake by stopping vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson product. Did you know that a “side effect” of the birthcontrol pill is the risk of one in a thousand of blood-clotting? The J&J vaccine appears to have a risk of one in a million. That’s a thousand times less! The risk of not reaching herd immunity and more people dying from Covid is a lot higher than one in a million.
02021-04-12 | HuHeartDrive, Music, Video
The first day of the rest of my life. That’s from a movie, isn’t it?
Yesterday “guitar + pipe” arrived on digital vendors, streaming and otherwise. It’s the first track I distributed through a different company. They were fast, with a turnaround of only 10 days. I made a mistake in the spelling of the title (“guitar +pipe” – without the space before “pipe”) to see how quickly they will be able to correct the mistake. I uploaded a second single, “Dance 4 Me” from “vision 2020 (Lockdown Version)”, which will become available on the 21st.
I worked on a video about incense smoke. The first footage didn’t look spectacular. This morning I woke up wondering whether the light needed to hit the smoke from below in order for the smoke to stand out. I found the tiny LED light that a friend gave me. It’s meant to be glued or taped to a drone. It did the job perfectly. Sadly it doesn’t put out constant light and so there is some slow strobing going on. But the look is great. You can check out the work in progress here. This afternoon I found another LED light that doesn’t flash and tomorrow I will work on a less “flashy” version.
Got my first vaccine jab this afternoon. Feels like a momentous step. I honestly do not understand anti-vaxers. My dad’s uncle co-invented one of the several polio vaccines that became available in the Fifties. A big deal that was. Vaccines have saved so many lives.
