So I've set up this Patreon page, in the hope of getting you folks who (if you're PEL fans, at least, and listen all the way to the end of the episodes where I put my songs for the first 150 episodes) have heard my music to maybe help out financially (and frankly, motivationally) as I try to get my catalog properly released and continue to create new music.

This is a hard sell, I know, not because my music isn't fricking awesome, but because people don't pay for entertainment on the Internet, because as a musician I have never "made it" and so am likely somewhat illegitimate in your eyes as compared to things recommended to you by the media (or anyone else), because you may well already support my podcasting activities and have reached the limits of your desire to support, etc.

So lest Patreon mark this page as inactive and stop displaying it, here's at least one post explaining what exactly I want support for.

This song, "Walled Off Space," was released on the final of three albums by my band New People. For the most part, we recorded all the parts ourselves. So this was a substantial time commitment, frankly mostly from Matt the guitarist who always took a long time with his parts. We used Matt's house/recording setup to record drums and most bass and vocals as well, with me occasionally doing some select parts at my house. So there's overhead for the equipment and the recording time itself, but all that is a matter of our passion for doing it, and doesn't require financial help.

What actually makes this song sound good, though, is the mixing and mastering, which was done for all the New People albums at Paradyme Studios in Madison, at something like $50 per hour. A song like this would take maybe 3 hours to mix, plus there's another $25 or so to master it, and I'm leaving aside CD manufacturing costs and graphic design.

So to make this sound radio quality as you're hearing here, that's about $175, or maybe $125 if we rush things along. That's extraordinarily cheap as compared to just about anything you've actually ever heard on the radio, but still required a substantial outlay of cash for a 12-15 song album, which luckily at the time I could split between three people and had some gig money rolling in that was typically entirely set aside for this purpose.

But you can see why on my own, this isn't really possible. For my 2015-released subsequent solo album, "Songs from the Partially Examined Life" (hear it here), I did the mixing at home by myself, and you can hear the (negative) difference in how relatively messy things sound. Even on that album, I had it mastered at Paradyme, so again, that's around $25/song, or about $425 for the whole thing, plus there's another $75 or so to get the album released on CDBaby/Spotify/Apple/etc. and purchase the UPC code that you have to buy to sell just about anything. Plus (again), artwork and CD manufacturing (I likely won't do much of this latter going forward!).

So I'm willing and able to cover many of these costs, but would love the validation of a couple hundred people willing to put up, say, $1 per finished song so that I can do them right, or even 25 people willing to help me not go in the hole when mastering. With more than 10 albums that need work to be released, this is a tremendous project that I've been putting off for years. Your support may make it happen, and given that your account will only be charged when I actually release something new, and you can put a monthly-support cap on it such that increased productivity by me won't result in unforeseen charges, there's no risk for you.

Enjoy "Walled Off Space," if you will, and think about whether you'd like more nuggets of joy like it in the world. Best, -Mark Linsenmayer