busybee fluffy rambles

For quite some time I’ve had my music site hosted by Bandcamp, since it was a pretty low-friction way to get my discography up and online, albeit with some annoying limitations. Previously I had the main domain host a “micro-site” for whatever my most recent release was and then used a subdomain for the actual Bandcamp page, but updating that got to be obnoxious and nobody really cared about the microsite thing anyway.

There’s a bunch of reasons, though, why I’m going to go back to running my own site, and hopefully downplaying Bandcamp as My Main Music Presence online. Here’s some of the reasons.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. That makes it a very good time to support independent musicians.

Right now I could use a bit of cash, as I’ve been hit with some unexpected expenses and I don’t have much of a safety net regarding money I can access right now. So, if you have any interest in my music, right now is a very good time to buy some of it. Or my whole discography, even. I have around two dozen releases each in a wide variety of genres, almost all written by me.

Caught up on my collections of:

• Posy
• Nicky Flowers

Added the discographies of:

• James Hastings
• our dear friend, the medic

So, hey, Bandcamp is a great service that a lot of musicians and fans rely upon for fair distribution and sales of music. It is a really great thing.

Unfortunately, Bandcamp’s owners decided that having a sustainably profitable business wasn’t Enough for them and sold it to Epic Games a year ago, with the idea that it’d become a money-printing factory that does All The Licensing.

And that didn’t pan out, so a week ago Epic re-sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, which is basically an A&R pay-for-play scam with the trappings of respectability. Here’s a video Benn Jordan did on the topic (focusing on a site called Taxi but Songtradr is the same basic thing):

Now Songtradr is blocking the Bandcamp union from actually being, y'know, a union. They aren’t honoring the union terms, have locked workers out of critical systems, are completely ignoring the collective bargaining power of Bandcamp as a company and are doing all sorts of heinous shit.

However! This is not a time to boycott Bandcamp! All that does is make Bandcamp less valuable and gives Songtradr more sway over them, while disproportionately impacting the musicians who rely on it. Please look to see what the union is requesting in terms of support and solidarity. There’s a lot you can do to show your support.

Independent musicians thank you.

I got a late start on listening to music today since this morning I was having some stomach issues and didn’t want the extra sensory input, and then I had to take Tyler to the vet for his annual wellness exam and butthole grooming.

But after I got home from that I started listening to music again. Here’s things that are tickled my ears today:

• Ouch Those Monkeys was a really weird musician who posted a lot of music to somesongs back in the day, and then disappeared just as suddenly. I collected most of his(?) music at the time. I wish there were more information about him. As far as I can tell it’s completely disappeared from the Internet.
• Magic Arm - Move Out is great. No idea how I ended up with it. Anyway I bought way too much music yesterday so this band is going into my Bandcamp Friday queue.
• Wow I have a lot of crap in my library. The downside to being a packrat.
• Also I’m not sure how to feel about songs that make use of the N-word (as a reclaimed thing, sung/spoken by Black artists). Part of me is like “this music isn’t for me and I shouldn’t listen to it” but another part of me is like “why is this particular racial barrier a line I draw and not others?” I of course would never sing along to it, but I also don’t generally sing along to music in the first place. I’m definitely a lot quicker to skip songs based on the use of that word and I think that deserves some introspection.
• So that said, Die Later is a pretty good jam.
• Okay I probably should draw the line at white rappers using the N-word though.
• The only Gorillaz albums I have are “Gorillaz” and “Plastic Beach.” I should complete my collection. I definitely don’t want to fall down the Deep Lore rabbit hole though.
• Jeremy Blake’s Heartsing is pretty great and it’s also surprising that my deep-dive listening pulled up something so recently-released. I guess that’s just how probability works.
• Artemis' Gravity is just plain amazing. It gives me pretty strong Portishead mixed with Imogen Heap vibes.
• A couple of good Remixfight songs came up. I miss Remixfight. It was a short-lived spinoff of Song Fight!, where folks would all do a different remix of the same song that week. Most of the folks who were active there eventually moved over to ccMixter but I never really found that the ccMixter remix output was even remotely as high-quality, for a number of reasons. Unfortunately I can’t figure out the actual artist behind this song, or the original song, and neither thing is findable online, and remixfight is long gone, and the archive.org archive of it is weirdly broken in ways I’ve never seen happen on archive.org, but it seems to be entitled “Blue Ocean” originally by Colin Mutchler. The specific remix I liked was by Milo; for some reason the tags on the fight were also messed up so I only heard that one in isolation, whee. But anyway uh. Remixfight was great.
• Brain Fog by Nicky Flowers is also pretty great. It also has a video as it turns out.