Brighter Curves
A New Album of Music and the Last One for a Little While
Brighter Curves
On June 1st, I released Brighter Curves, a 13-track / 42 minute album of ambient/electronic improvisations originally created via livestreams during April, 2024, on my YouTube channel.
Listen here:
The finished recordings on Brighter Curves are slightly different from the original livestreams. They’ve been edited, balanced, and sonically tweaked. They’re not perfect - sometimes I bump a wire or cause distortion - but I leave the imperfection in because it sounds good to me.
How was the music made? I triggered the notes on Brighter Curves using a kalimba, a lap steel guitar, or various iOS apps. Then it goes into my chain of “expensive boxes”, which have nothing but knobs and buttons. There’s no multitracking. No project files. No presets. Nothing is ever the same. The music is captured via an audio recorder.
For the livestreams, it continues on through my Focusrite Scarlett and then into my computer to Streamyard where it is broadcast to YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch.
Brighter Curves is likely the last album I am releasing to Spotify. It was scheduled for release before I discovered that Spotify is refusing to pay artists whose tracks fail to achieve 1000 streams in a calendar year. A lot of the music I release falls into this category.
Every other streaming service pays artists without instituting any kind of absurd threshold for emerging artists or those working in more niche genres. Of course, Spotify is going to try to do this to artists who can’t afford to file a lawsuit.
Spotify was also recently sued by The Mechanical License Collective for refusing to pay proper mechanical royalties to rights holders (artists, record companies) due to some new loophole regarding the bundling of audiobooks into Spotify’s Premium plans.
There’s a lot of other things going on with Spotify. The growth years are over. Investors want a return. The company is more-or-less a utility now, but is unable to operate with that kind of mindset.
It’s the beginning of the end when a company abuses those who built it. Billionaires always need more money, so they think it’s perfectly OK to steal it from the content creators - the artists.
I can do my listening on other streaming platforms where I have subscriptions. I don’t have to release my music and sounds to their platform.
Ambient Rushton Podcast 195
Last week, I moved my “almost 20 year old” podcast to Substack and put out a “test podcast”. The podcast is now a “subsection” of this newsletter, so if you’re signed up for the newsletter then you’ll get notification of the podcast, too.
I looked at other sites where my old podcast was listed and it seemed like everything transitioned correctly.
I should have another podcast soon, talking about the Brighter Curves album, and maybe playing some of it.
Goals for Summer 2024
While I continue to create new music, I don’t think I’ll release a new album for a couple of months. I’m going to be busy with administrative things. Occasionally, I’ll go into “edit mode” and ready tracks for the future. I do that every week or two.
At the end of June, I’m leaving my publishing administrator and “going solo”. It’ll be a lot of copying and pasting data from my Airtable database into Excel templates for The MLC and ASCAP.
After I’m settled into The MLC and ASCAP, I have a project that I’ll have to get completed. I’ll talk about that later.
Right now, I’m slowly adding my music catalog into Identifyy, a service that sniffs out usage of my music all over the world. I had been using another service since 2013, but they now have bad reviews, are owned by a company I don’t want to do business with, and so it’s time to switch horses.
This Week’s Closing
As an artist, or a “creative”, or whatever you want to call me, it just seems like we have to endlessly pivot around these tech companies. These days, we have to work with them. But they’re not our friends. Or, it seems, even our business partners.
I really do blame the tech industry for their attitude problem. They all seem to have some kind of major malfunction. I think most major tech companies have devolved into one big scam. The internet quit being fun. Now it’s all about ads and censorship and paywalls. “Business, numbers, money, people” - in that order.
And so-called “AI”- perhaps the biggest scam ever.
Recently, I happened across Ron Jeffries’ recent post about “AI” (“It’s Not AI”), and I thought it was an excellent read.