And It Don't Stop
When the Muse Doesn't Settle Down
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been occasionally jumping on the internet in the evening to live stream my new ambient music creations. Here’s an example - wear good headphones to listen:
I like working this way. I’ve been taking the recordings, which are recorded live, but in a process chain that occurs just before it goes onto the internet, so the actual recording sounds slightly different. These recordings, after being edited, will form the basis of future releases.
I’ve been back to the Day Job for the past year. It takes a lot of time and mental space. I do like what I do, but I don’t talk about it. I like talking about the art side of things.
Lately, “the muse” hasn’t settled down. As a “creative”, I’m constantly dealing with the pressure to make things: audio recordings and visual art, for the most part. I have too many ideas. I’m not complaining. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just stating where my brain is these days.
So by the time I wind down for the day - after driving home from work, running errands, and dealing with important things, I am usually ready for creativity.
During my time between day jobs, I realized that I had no desire to become a full-time visual artist or recording artist. I tried to put in “full time hours” as a creative, but it just wasn’t there. The art side was best left as a part-time thing for me.
In Other News:
The problems I had with my publishing administrator, Songtrust, have more-or-less been resolved, but I have many reasons to not trust them. And where I’m going as a recording artist is not compatible with the services they provide, but they didn’t make that clear. I had to re-read their Terms of Service to understand what they weren’t saying. Songtrust will no longer be my publishing administrator as of June 30, 2024, and I’ll be self-managing my catalog as a recording artist after that.
Songtrust seemed like a great idea in the beginning. They got me royalties I couldn’t have obtained at the time. But in the last two or three years, the company appears to lost it’s way. Most of the reviews on Trust Pilot have gone 1-star negative:
I haven’t left a review and I won’t, but I like to point out sites like Trust Pilot to others. The truth is always in the comments.
My complaints with Songtrust are:
Questionable payment notifications and reporting data.
Realizing that they do not act like a traditional publishing administrator. At my request, they will not remove a title from a publishing society like ASCAP. As a recording artist, there are situations where such a thing is necessary for other deals I make on titles in my catalog. It appears that Songtrust will not “relinquish” their 15% cut on the publishing side of a single title without me completely cancelling my contract with Songtrust.
Discovering that Songtrust hadn’t registered any of the 200+ titles I’ve entered into their database with my PRO (ASCAP) in well over a year. And discovering that none of my titles have been added to The MLC’s database in over 10 months. In this age of APIs and batch data processing, there’s no excuse for this. I can manually enter a title into ASCAP and The MLC and it’s in there today, and confirmed as registered within a week or so.
Looking at Songtrust’s interface, I have no idea to which societies my titles have been registered. There are over 50 societies around the world, but Songtrust provides no list of where they’ve actually been registered. I know my music has been streamed in every country on the planet that’s affiliated with a local or regional collection society, so I should eventually be receiving royalties from those locations, but the Songtrust reporting data does not reflect this after 5 years of being affiliated.
Terrible customer service. It took 7 weeks of trying to contract them every way possible, other than through lawyers, to get a response. Songtrust really only responded after I submitted my Cancellation and requested my Letter of Relinquishment.
OK, that’s enough rambling about Songtrust.
I do need to maintain my humor, and here’s a way that helps:
That’s it for this week!