Hi, all!
Feel free to do a quick introduction if you’ve joined this instance, or if you’re from another instance but interested in the communities here.
I’ll go first: I’m Beto, originally from Brazil but living in California. I started writing songs when I was 14 years old, and always loved making music.
I have a one-person band called The Fishermen & the Priestess, and I post all my songs (releases and experimental tracks) on a Funkwhale instance (which is another federated project).
My songs are usually ambient/downtempo and very hopeful. I love using cassette tapes, tape loops, and 4-track recorders, and I’m planning to release my next album on microcassettes.
I’m still learning the ropes of this thing but I’ve gotten really good at finding communities. What I haven’t done much is comment and browse. Now that I’m happy with the amount of subscriptions I’ve added it’s time to start commenting and upvoting everything I see. I didn’t notice this thread until now so I guess it’s the best place to start.
Like many people I’m a reddit refugee. My plans are to delete my 15yo account and not look back. I don’t care if they fix what’s wrong with the place. Honestly, I don’t think they can. A decentralized internet was what was great about the internet before and it makes no sense to embrace anything else.
So… about me… I’ve been an amateur musician most of my life and have never released an album. Two years ago I got laid off from my software job and decided to spend time getting more into what I’m passionate about before hopping back into a paying job. My band is working on a weird synth-pop/rap album so I’ve been researching mixing/mastering for a while. Hoping to release something before the end of the summer.
My main DAW for the past 15 years has been Ardour but I recently switched to Reaper because that’s what the rest of the band was familiar with. I started the Reaper community here so I’ll posting there when I see interesting and relevant information. I’ve always been more of a lurker/upvoter than a poster or moderator so it’s kind of cool to be on a smaller community where I think there’s even a chance someone will read something I’ve posted.
Thanks for hosting, Beto!
Welcome!
I’m also a Reddit refugee… it was quite a ride, I had my account for 17 years and had lots of good memories (I really miss the Secret Santas!), but even before the API fiasco I was already thinking of uninstalling the app from my phone. In the past years I’ve been slowly moving away from big social media and into the fediverse: I stopped using Facebook (though I kept the account), deleted my Twitter account, and I was feeling I was spending too much time on Reddit.
(Strangely, with the API fiasco, when I decided it was finally time to delete my 17-year old account, I asked myself “what are things I want to save before deleting the account?” but I couldn’t think of anything.)
I agree with you that Reddit is probably unfixable. Yesterday I read about the enshittification of the internet and I thought it was spot on: it’s clearly what happened to Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and, now, Tiktok and Reddit. The comment from
/u/spezconfirms that:But let’s talk about music! Keep us posted on the status of the album, I’d love to listen to it when it comes out, the concept sounds super interesting! Have you thought about how you’re going to release it? Bandcamp, big streaming platforms? I publish all my songs on Bandcamp and Funkwhale as a “backstage” catalog, and then every now and then I release something more polished on Spotify/etc. via Distrokid.
And thanks for creating the Reaper community! I’ve been using Ardour for a few years now, after starting with Ableton and later Bitwig, but I always hear good things about Reaper. I have to check it out one of these days.
I’ve done a little research but have been putting that off so I can focus on what we have left to finish. We still have a lot of artwork to do as well. Album cover, some videos, some historical fiction writing for our websites.
We’ll either use CDBaby or Distrokid but probably CDBaby. I like the idea of paying once instead of a yearly fee to keep stuff online. I don’t expect to make much (or any) money on this but I’m going to invest in it and do it right just in case. I’d hate to put it out there and miss out on those fractions of pennies trickling in.
Several articles I read about releasing music suggested setting up a publishing company to retain more control of the royalties. Is that something you did?
Yeah, CDBaby makes sense… I went with Distrokid because I make a lot of songs, but in the end I only publish a minority of them so maybe CDBaby wouldn’t been better for me. I never made enough money to worry about royalties (I just checked and I made $24 overall from Distrokid), but to be fair I don’t market my albums other than letting friends now.
One thing I did though was sign up for USISRC.org, so I could get UPC/EAN numbers for my songs. It’s a one time fee to get as many numbers as you need.
That’s good to know. Seems required for Distrokid but not CDBaby. Have you used BeatStars at all?
I didn’t need it for Distrokid, I just thought it would be cool to be able to assign the numbers to my songs at will. 😝 I haven’t heard of BeatStars, it looks interesting!
Hahahah…that is pretty rad. I looked through some of the guides and saw you’re limited to 100,000 a year. Hope that’s enough :D.
I suppose if someone was just cranking out generative tunes that wouldn’t be too hard.
Ha, for sure, my record is 100 songs in a year, so I have plenty of numbers to spare. 😝