Oh! I’m on a podcast this week called Mac Power Users. When they have guests, they talk about workflows. So I go into some excruciating detail about how I make a song a day. A lot of gear and software talk. Some nitty gritty stuff. Give a listen, I think it’ll be interesting!

It got me thinking about how cool it would be if I was able to continue my “How I Write A Song A Day” tutorial series. Which, weirdly, was watched by almost no one when I first made it, but has had a serious “long tail”.

If I do this, what would be the aspects of Song A Day that you would like me to talk about in detail?

I was thinking I could  take you through using Logic, the recording program I use, and Premiere, which I use to make videos. I could detail and walkthrough each of the different “styles” of song a day: 

1. The acoustic song with iPhone, 

2. The acoustic song with 2 microphones and a nice camera, 

3. The produced song with nice camera, 

4. The produced song with a produced video.

I have a lot of other ideas for updates to my older videos like: 

How to beat writer's block, 

Where to find ideas for songs,

All the branding mistakes I've made over the years (and how to avoid them)

I was thinking that I could make this series of videos and then offer it up for a small fee. You all, as my Patreon supporters, would of course have instant access! Let me know if this is interesting! I wonder if people would pay for such a thing.

Anyway, It’s 6am and I’m sitting at the table next to Jupiter trying to get him to eat his breakfast. He’s been up since 5. Juliana and I take turns on who watches him in the morning. It always sucks when he decides to wake up extra early on my morning. Why, Jupiter, why?! I’m so tired. It was one of those mornings too where it’s like, wow, I’m really extra tired, I hope Jupiter doesn’t wake up early. And boom! Like clockwork.

Right before he woke me up, I was having a series of nightmares that bad things were happening to him. In one he was just standing in the middle of the road. It was the road I grew up on. I was terrified a car was going to hit him. In another, my mom had spent the day with him and was showing me pictures she had taken. There was a picture of him standing on some ice that seemed really thin. (You’re on thin ice, mister!). In another, and this was the really freaky one, she played me a video of the two of them white river rafting. My 15 month old son and my 60 something (sorry mom) year old mother white river rafting! In the video, she fell out of the raft (as you do) and there was Jupi just left alone in this raft. My mom can’t even swim that well. I woke up really panicked for a second.

Sorry! I’m talking about my dreams - that’s like the most boring thing ever. And I’ve got new Patreon subscribers this week! Oi, I am sorry. Usually I’m a lot more interesting than this, I promise. I’m just really tired and it’s just way too early.

There's two amazing pieces on Medium by a dude named Sharky Laguana about how to fix streaming music. You know the problem: Artists are paid fractions of pennies per stream through services like Spotify and Apple Music, but at the same time, these platforms are an amazing way to discover new music and be discovered by new fans. I HIGHLY recommend reading Sharky's pieces, but first, read what I wrote as a script for an upcoming vlog on the subject! Please!

Sharky does a great job of simplifying a complex subject, and I tried to go even further so that the message can reach as far and wide as possible. Tell me what you think!

______________________________________________________________________

DISCLAIMER!

This video is about the royalties generated by online streaming services. It’s a really complicated topic. Sharky Laguana, a musician and writer, wrote a series of posts on Medium which I’m using as the basis for everything that I’m about to say. His piece simplifies and illuminates this complex subject and I’m going to be simplifying it even further. There’s lots of data to back all of it up, though, so click the links in the description and look out for more posts by Sharky.

The question at the heart of all of this is: Is there a way to make streaming services be more fair to musicians? Let’s get into it.

Spotify makes the vast majority of it’s money from the over 10 million people that send them $10 a month to listen ad free. When you pay that $10 a month, almost none of it goes to the actual artists you listen to. Lately on Spotify I’ve been listening to a ton of Eef Barzelay, who strangely enough I discovered from a yogurt commercial. Anyway, I’d love it if a huge chunk of my recent subscription fees went straight to him. I’m a big fan. Unfortunately though, that’s just not how it works.

What Spotify does is they put all my subscription money, and yours and everybody else’s into a big pool, they take a 30 percent cut, and then earmark the rest for royalties. How is the rest divvied up? This bag of royalties is divided by the total number of streams across the entire service in the given period and this gets us a number called the “per-stream royalty rate”. Multiply my # of streams in a month by this per-stream royalty rate, and you have the amount I’m paying out to artists.

This big pool system has a bunch of problems, but I’m going to focus on my perspective as both a fan and a musician. Not only does this method of royalty distribution mean that I have absolutely no control over who gets a piece of my hard earned $10 a month, it also means that if you’re a “typical listener” like me, who streams around 300 tracks a month, I actually end up subsidizing a “heavy listener” who’s streaming 1000 or more tracks a month. I end up paying for someone else’s musical taste. Let’s look at how this works.

Out of my $10 subscription fee, $3 goes to Spotify and that leaves $7 to go to royalties. Let’s say I listen to 200 tracks this month. Based on the per-stream royalty rate we established above that means I’ve generated a cool $1.40 to be paid out to artists. But wait - $7 out of my original $10 was earmarked for royalties, I generated $1.40 with my 200 streamed tracks, so that leaves $5.60 hanging in the balance. Where does that money go?

It goes to subsidize a heavy listener, who’s streaming, say, 1800 tracks that month. They pay the same $10 subscription fee as everyone else but they’ve generate $12.60 in royalties, which leaves them $5.60 short. Oh look, I have $5.60 left over. Boom - I just paid for someone else to listen to Nickelback.

I wanted my money to go to an semi-obscure indie artist I’m currently obsessed with, who I’ve listened to almost exclusively this month, and instead my money went to Nickelback, and god knows who else. Probably, based on nothing else than sheer number of streams, a bunch of artists in the top 40. The system is broken.

Often these heavy listeners aren’t even individuals, but offices and yoga studios and restaurants who just have music as background 24/7. They pay the sam 10 dollar sub fee, but because they’re such heavy listeners they dictate, in a very real way, how the money gets divvied up. I don’t want to be paying for the artists these companies put on their playlists.

There is a better way. In his multiple Medium posts, Sharky calls it the Subscriber Share Model. It’s pretty simple: Spotify should just divide up my $7 based on who I specifically listen to that month. So if I listen to Eef 100% of the time in a given month, he’ll get my entire $7. If I listen to The Spinto Band 25% of the time, they’ll get $1.75. Compare that to the big pool: If I listen to 200 tracks in a month, and 50 of those streams are The Spinto Band (25% of 200 is 50), based on the per stream royalty rate, they stand to make only $.35.

The Subscriber Share Model is a fantastic idea. As Sharky says in his Medium post: It honors the intent of the listener, and incentivizes getting more fans, bringing the goals of everyone (services, labels, artists and fans) into alignment.

Spotify isn’t likely to do this anytime soon. But Sharky has an answer for that, too. He’s come up with the idea for a protest called Silent September. Normally, it’s impossibly for a typical listener to keep up with the heavies - the business that keep the music pumping all day. So the idea for the protest is this: For the month of September, turn your volume down really low, and keep your streaming service of choice going 24/7 with a playlist of indie artists you love on repeat. Streaming services can’t tell when your volume is down, and if you have a big playlist of artists on repeat, it won’t trigger any alarm bells. There’s nothing they can do to stop you. If you’re a typical listener and you do this for even just a day, it will double your monthly listening. Doing it for a week will result in more streams than a typical listener does in a year! If enough of us do this and we we focus on the indie artists we love, the major labels will start to worry about their piece of the big pool pie decreasing. That’s when they’d really take notice at just how unfair the current system for distributing royalties is.

I’ve made a playlist in both Spotify and Apple Music of the artists I’m going to be streaming for the month of Sept. Let’s make this happen!!

I’m on vacation! We’re at the beach in Rhode Island. My parents came and met us down here for a day and night, and now we're spending 2 more nights here. Juliana is really good about saving money, especially for specific purposes. She’s set us up a vacation fund. So here we are!

This is a “no work allowed” vacation, but as I pointed out to J, it’s hard for me because my work is just so integrated into my life. There is no vacation from Song A Day. I still have to sit down and eek something out. I wonder if it’s like that for other freelancers? Sometimes I think it would be nice to have a proper job where I could leave it behind and not think about it at all for a whole week. Then I could come back fresh.

Alas, that’s not the life I’ve chosen.

I was talking to my dad and he said he’s always found vacations to be really stressful. I understand where he’s coming from. When I was younger, I used to try to control and plan everything. I drove myself and everyone around me crazy with it. STICK TO THE PLAN! I still have a bit of that in me, though I’ve gotten a lot better.

Nowadays, what’s exhausting is: Jupiter. He’s nonstop. Running into the ocean (he’s 16 months, can’t swim and has no conception of the danger of the waves that are bigger than he is), sitting in his high chair, throwing everything onto the floor, over and over again. He’s learned to open doors, so he just opens the hotel room door and goes running off down the hallway. Absolutely no fear. 

Earlier this morning Juliana and Jupi were next door in my parent’s room and I was laying on the bed trying to think of something to write about. I was listening to the ocean. I was thinking about how the ocean has been making that sound for so, so, SO much longer than humans have even existed. Before dinosaurs. Before life, even. That’s crazy. And then I came into myself for a second, and my thoughts went to my body, like you do during meditation. I felt myself lying on the bed. I felt the weight of my body just lying there. I heard all the sounds anew, the ocean but also the hum of AC units and little kids laughing.

I rarely find time to mediate anymore, but the most profound thing about doing it at all was that every once in a while, I find myself coming into myself like that. It’s such a peculiar feeling. It really is what I described above: I just sort of leave everything behind. You can do that at any point. It’s the idea that whatever you are doing right now, at this very moment, is what you are doing.  Duh, right? But rarely is that where my attention is actually pointed. 

There is no work, until you’re working. There is no driving until you’re driving.  When I'm chasing Jupiter down the hall, that's all I'm doing, really. In reality. There’s actually nothing to stress out about. So just chill, OK?

Thanks so much for your feedback on last week's post. Josh Woodward put it this way: 

"Nobody has it all. The best you can do is to use your strengths to muscle your way around the weaknesses."

That's something that it's hard to remember. The other aspect of that equation is that you have to find people to collaborate with who have the strengths that you lack. Finding collaborators like that can be hard. There's a lot of obstacles. For one thing, everyone has their own stuff going on. I'm happy to spend a certain amount of time giving my expertise to friends and colleagues, but ultimately their thing is THEIR thing and my thing is MY thing. Casual collaboration only goes so far. I think all parties have to have skin in the game in order for collaboration to really take off.

I'm trying to get better at this, and find folks to work with who have the time and interest in throwing their lots in with me on a variety of projects. One of those projects is a Song A Day Navigator. The first step on my end was putting together the spreadsheet of every single song (which I had) with every single YouTube link (which I hadn't done before, duh). This gives us a very basic song a day data set that he can work with. Future data points in that spreadsheet would be: lyrics, links to buy, # of views, etc. But the next step for me is to figure out some interesting ways to NAVIGATE that data. I've come up with three so far. One of them is the image above: The Pick A Number system. I'm also attaching images for how I image a "Timehopper" version would look and one that's based on words.

My question to you: Are any of these three ways of looking at Song A Day particularly interesting to you? Can you think of other ways that would be more interesting to interact with this massive catalog of songs?

The person I'm working with is working on his own project that I don't TOTALLY understand, but it has to do with APIs. I think he's trying to make a thing that makes it super easy for anyone to make an API to go with a data set. The idea being, in the case of Song A Day, that he's going to create this API for interacting with all 2400+++ songs that other people can just take and run with. So if you had an idea of how you'd like to organize my catalog, and you just wanted to do it, you could. 

I'm really excited about it.

I was a good kid. I followed the rules and I got good grades. I took standardized tests seriously. So seriously that I’d get anxiety attacks beforehand.

But I remember a moment, some random day on my long, harsh road from little-kid-ness through puberty, I was maybe 11 years old. I was sitting in the back of the school bus having this revelation that, like, I didn’t have to follow the rules. Before that exact moment, it had seemed like all the things adults were telling me to do were somehow the only way. Their words were bedrock truth. And suddenly I realized that it was all bullshit. It was a weird, frightening and exciting moment.

I started to get into trouble. Nothing too horrible, but enough for me to be able to mark that moment as “before trouble” and “after trouble”.

Here’s the story of the “Worst Thing” I ever did as a kid. It’s actually not that bad, especially compared to stories I’ve been told by friends over the years of their worst things. But it’s pretty awful. For a pre-teen living in the backwoods of Vermont who’d never been in “serious” trouble before, this was top of the line, I think.

It was a slow weekend day, I was probably 12 years old. I have no idea where my parents were. Maybe they were working? Anyway, I had a group of 3 or 4 friends over. We were bored out of our minds. We decided to go for a walk. The town where I grew up is all dirt roads and forest. We used to just walk around for hours.

On this particular day, our first stop was a construction site - a house that was being built not far down the road from where I lived. The frame of the house was complete. It was all just concrete and two by fours. We trashed the place. We knocked stuff over. We broke some wood. We etched things into a metal tool chest. We spread nails out everywhere.

We left the construction site in search of something else to vandalize. At some point we got off the road and just started wandering through the woods. We came upon a sugar shack. This is where you turn maple sap into syrup. We broke all the windows. There were these little glass jars of syrup samples, grade A through D. We took turns throwing them at the side of the shack, syrup splattering everywhere. We broke some of the equipment.

Having gotten our pre-teen, testosterone boredom fueled jollies, we headed back to my house. Not long after, a police car rolled into my driveway. We freaked out. The cop rang the doorbell. We all hid, in closest and under beds. Still just little kids.

The cop came back that night when my parents were home. He said it was easy to figure out who was responsible because there were footprints leading all the way from where we had exited the woods straight back to my house. Dirt roads, after all. We were such idiots.

In my memory, I was being admonished by the cop and my parents for least two hours. I can’t imagine he actually stayed for more than 15 minutes. But my parents were predictably livid.

My friends and I had to collectively pay for the repairs and all the samples we destroyed. I don’t remember how much it was per person, but it was a lot for a 12 year old.All my weekly allowance went towards it for at least half a year. Finally, I saved enough money to pay, and I walked the few miles down to the house of the guy who owned the sugar shack. He wasn’t home, but his wife invited me in and gave me a brownie. She was so sweet. She said we were lucky we didn’t hang out much longer around the shack because her husband had heard us breaking stuff and had gone out to investigate with his hunting rifle. She sent me on my way with a little baggie full of baked goods.

This incident stands out so strongly in my mind partly because it felt so dramatic, but also partly because as I’ve gotten older and older, I find it harder and harder to understand why we acted the way we did. When you’re a teenager like that, you feel like no one understands you. And that’s actually true. I’m at the point now, near 2 decades later, where I’m just completely baffled.