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This is where I ramble about things that interest me, provide information and updates, and/or tell stories about production, touring, etc.

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Spotify Sucks December 3rd, 2025 Today is Spotify Wrapped day, every year, all across the internet, people post what the app says they've been listening to the most. Top artists, top genres, some artists even include little recorded videos thanking their most loyal listeners, how quaint! I despise Spotify Wrapped day and Spotify as a whole. Spofity as a concept is the logical continuation of the music industry's never-ending quest to compensate artists as little as possible while making as much money off of them as they can. This is reflected starkly in the criminally low payouts to any and all artists on the platform. The average seems to be around 0.2-0.4 cents a stream. Not 4 cents, not 2 cents, 2 to 4 tenths of a cent for every listen. This is by no means an issue that's gone unaddressed, Gary Numan, one of the pioneers of electronic music as we know it today, has gone on record and stated that for a track that hit one million streams on Spotify he was paid £37. The truth of the matter is that the average person doesn't know any of this, and the convenience of having an app with all the music on it is too great for your average Joe to really consider getting rid of it. Why, if you buy premium you get to listen ad free! At least the money is going to a good place, right? In June of 2025 Spotify CEO David Elk's investment firm pledged 600 Million dollars to Helsing, a German munitions company who specializes in drone development and AI assisted surveillance technology. Now the money that's being siphoned out of the pockets of musicians across the globe is being used to blow up children! One of the most obnoxious parts about having music on Spotify is that you can't just upload it yourself, you have to either have it done through your label, or for smaller artists like myself who publish independently, you have to use a go-between service like DistroKid or Routenote. This introduces a whole new layer of awful to the experience; want to upload a song with samples? You'd better hope any and all of them are either cleared with the rights holder or public domain. Can't find the rights holder for an obscure recording from a UK based college TV station in the 70s? Tough luck kid, it's not going up until you remove or replace it. Prominent upload services like Distrokid also don't allow you to upload "Spoken Word" to Spotify, what does "Spoken Word" entail? Who knows, it's ultimately up to their discretion, and that means that the opening and closing bookends to my last album 7800 aren't viable. This all leads us to one question, Why? Why keep my music on Spotify? Truthfully, I find it harder and harder to justify it to myself every day. But the biggest issue I run into is that most people my age use almost exclusively Spotify. All the big artists are on there, why switch to Bandcamp when there's no Chappel Roan there? Why buy a CD of Taylor Swift's new album that requires you to put it in some flavor of player when you can listen to the whole thing for free on your phone whenever you want? People value convenience, and they don't like being told that their convenience is objectively harmful. Some sizeable acts have started taking their work off of Spotify (King Gizzard, Xiu Xiu, Massive Attack, Godspeed You Black Emperor, etc) but this has also coincided with sharp downturns in listeners, people just aren't willing to jump ship for a couple of artists, and when you're trying to make a living off your music, you're going to feel it in your wallet cutting off nearly half your listener base. At the end of the day, if you want to listen to objectively worse mixes of my music with incomplete tracklists while Shaq tries to sell you ball deodorant in between the songs that are meant to flow seamlessly all while giving me no support whatsoever it's your funeral. If you've made it this far, I encourage you to please for the love of god, make a Bandcamp account, look at your wrapped this year, look at your top artist, and if possible go over to Bandcamp and buy at least one of their albums. $7 for one album is roughly equivalent to 350,000 streams. Which one's more sustainable? You do the math.

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