so, what am i up to?
i crashed yesterday afternoon and was up in the evening. i fell asleep while updating this page and it ended up taking me until the morning to finish it:
i'm under cyberattack by some fascist muslims that want to launch a jihad against me for saying mean things about their idol. you know you're all going to hell for idolatry, right? so, i'm trying to reduce the number of cookies...
i actually don't think it's google, at this point. google always takes my side, and they've shown me what they do if they want to remove something. it's ordered and predictable; it's not this kind of primitive hack on my internet. this is some vigilantes that don't care about civilized law, and want to barbarically take things into their own hands. but, they're just fucking swimming in cash, remember. it's easy to get what you want when you're a millionaire...or a billionaire....
i don't know the extent of it, but i seem to have gotten the attention of some powerful zealots....
i was specifically doubling the prices of everything physical, and otherwise verifying that everything was correct with the new pricing. this is a relatively important update to do if i'm going to be uploading isos to the payhip site.
i understand that people don't really want to buy physical media anymore. i have to admit that i'd still be buying it if i wasn't broke, because i like it; i like the cd shelf. it's a mark of obscurity. and, if you have disposable income, you spend it on art...
so, what do i do, as an artist? it's not economical. i want the option available, but i understand that i'm selling torrents...
i mean, i'm not a pop star. i don't write jingles. i'm not a singer-songwriter. i'm not a sex idol pretending to be a musician. i'm kind of an old-fashioned thing at this point - i'm a musician with a large, album-oriented discography. so, it's easy to tell me to sign up for a streaming service, but it's really not the universe i live within. i mean, i'm a consumer too, and i wouldn't have the slightest interest in something like spotify - it's just a bunch of major label crap. if i'm anything, i'm an independent artist. but the technology is crowding me out because the fuckers have monopolized the means of production.
but, i'm more pissed off about the market. frankly, as hard as it is to sell things on the internet, it's even harder to sell them in real life. i'd be nowhere at all without a website. but, consumers expect everything to be free, nowadays, and i'm guilty of that, too.
so, i'm not selling singles to tweens. i'm not trying to go viral on youtube (although i was at one point, and think i did a few times - it didn't translate to much). and, i'd like to sell you a cd, but nobody's buying. that's not my universe, it's not my market, it's not the world i live and breathe in.
what people in my universe want is full discography torrents. they want to download twenty records at a time. and, i've done that - i did it with cardiacs in the 00s, i did it with swans in the 90s. these were artists before my time that i was happy to find and benefited dramatically from finding. and, that is my audience - people looking for music that exists beyond the image, that is real and interesting to listen to. it's a small potential audience, but if you click into it...
i've got the dvds for sale, but kids nowadays don't even have optical drives.
this is why i'm setting up the payhip site - i'm trying to give the people, my people, my audience, what they actually want.
in the process, i created a sequence of physical companions to the existing dvd sequence with the intent of building a one click option to purchase all cds:
unfortunately, bandcamp wouldn't allow for a price that high. so, we got what exists, instead.
and, that was my night - not what i planned, but a little progress.
