busybee fluffy rambles

Ko-Fi is a better company, but it’s missing a lot of useful/necessary features for me, such as:

• Sharing audio that isn’t already posted on another public website
• Sharing digital downloads only to members of a certain support tier or higher
• Being a place people want to actually subscribe to support me

Which is to say, even with me being completely inactive on Patreon, I still have a handful of people supporting me there, while the only support I’ve gotten on Ko-Fi is a handful of one-time donations. Which I appreciate, of course! But that’s not a sustainable way to build an income.

Lately I’ve been putting myself out there a lot more in terms of music production and performance in particular, and what I’m finding is:

1. People don’t want to buy albums on Bandcamp, much less Mirlo
2. People want to support musicians by listening to them on Spotify and then throwing some extra bucks via Patreon to get “insider” access
3. People want to subscribe to updates through a centralized location (meaning Patreon) instead of following via RSS or social media

So, fine. Patreon sucks. Etsy sucks. Gumroad sucks. But those are the only places that people use for things I’m trying to do, so if I want to play the game, I gotta follow the rules.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been trying to use Twine (the gig economy site, not the game engine) to get gigs and that’s also very slow going. It’s basically Upwork but in reverse, and I have to pay a subscription fee to even get a chance of getting a job there, and every single gig that I’m interested in gets flooded with applicants, who I presume are from countries where they can afford to undercut me in terms of price. Which is the same problem with Fiverr and Upwork and so on.

I hate that maintaining a Patreon is so much work, but what’s even more work is trying to build my own platform for doing this shit where nobody would want to use it anyway, solving nothing.

So anyway, all that’s to say, if you want to throw a few bucks my way as a one-time thing, do it on Ko-Fi, but if you want to keep up with the stuff I’m doing — and I’m trying to get a lot better about keeping folks up-to-date with it — then my Patreon is the way to go, at least for the time being.

My plan isn’t to do Patreon full-time, of course, but I’m planning on using it to share early access to all the things I want to work on, and maybe that’ll motivate me to do more of it. And I do hope you’ll join me there.