u/Wessberg

Hey there. I've been using SubmitHub to submit my latest 3 singles to playlist curators.

Apparently, the average share rate is 28%.
My success rate has been a lot worse than that for the first two singles, but for my third and latest single, only 1 out of 44 curators accepted it for sharing on their playlist. That's roughly 2%! Two percent!!

This is so confusing to me. I really thought these songs would at least perform closer to the average. I've spent years refining these songs and I'm very happy with them, but obviously all this rejection is starting to make me question everything. Clearly there's something I'm doing wrong, that's for sure.

While my music is definitely mixing genres a lot, it's still clearly fundamentally Pop-Rock, so I always try to send it to a wide mix of pop- and rock curators. I try to reach curators with an average acceptance rate between 12% - 30%.

Their feedback is frequently "nice production, nice songwriting, cool drums, nice vocals", and always really positive and complimentary, but then its either too pop or not pop enough, too energetic, or lacking energy. The vocals fill too much in the arrangement, or they're not standing out enough. It's too modern, or its too retro.

That makes me conclude it's a matter of bad fit. I must be extremely awful at figuring out which curators to send my music to. But honestly, the same names keep coming up, so I guess there's practically no curators on SubmitHub that has playlists my music fits into. I almost can't believe this.

I'm not even sure what my question is. Just desperation, I guess.

I guess it would count as self-promotion to share a link to the song, which is against the rules, so I'll not do that, but if anyone wants to take a listen and provide some feedback as to which curators, similar artists, or genres to align myself with, please feel free to reach out, and I'll send you that in a DM.

I came back to Starfield on PC to try the Free Lanes update, and I decided to do it in VR, as Mutar's excellent VR mod now supports Free Lanes. I did it alongside a few really interesting mods, most notably "True Seamless Grav Jumps" and "Astrogate".

And wow, I always really liked Starfield, but now it's all really coming together for me. I see what I think was the intended vision for Starfield shine so brightly, and it makes a lot of my old nitpicks matter less or even not at all.

Now, for the first time ever, I spend most of my time in my ship. With Cruise mode, interplanetary travel will take some time, and with "Astrogate", so will grav jumps.

This alone has a much bigger impact than I anticipated! There are no loading screens, and I cannot overstate just how much this means for the game: I decorate my ship, I talk to my crew, upgrade my weapons, manage my inventory, research new stuff, all while I wait. I'm never taken out of this flow doing traveling, so I'm completely immersed. I have a small vessel, there's a bed in there, some cozy plants, a coffee maker, you know, the essentials, and it feels like such a lovely way to get a break from reality for a bit.

And because it's VR, I also just go around and look at the incredible detail BGS put into every button, every machine, every little thing that makes up these spaceships.

Usually with PCVR mods, you realize that the assets just weren't made for VR. But with Starfield, this is absolutely not the case. Everything is extremely detailed, I see small things everywhere that I never truly appreciated before. The attention to detail in that department is second to none.

After grav jumps, I arrive at the star of the solar system, making it a requirement for me to maneuver to my destination using cruise mode. I'm just locked in and totally immersed.

In the past, I would be caught in a loop of fast traveling around, doing side quests like a to-do list that often felt mostly like a chore, almost completely sidelining the space maneuvering aspect of the game. But now, I spend a few hours just exploring one or two solar systems, doing one or two quests and discovering stuff organically along the way. Completing quests that less frequently makes them feel more meaningful.

The whole "NASA-punk" and "grounded sci-fi" aesthetic always looked pleasing, but I found it just a little boring with the lack of intelligent alien life and other common sci-fi tropes, but now I just truly appreciate it. It feels believable, and strikes a very nice balance between actual science and what could become science fact one day. I'm enhancing this approach by using the mod "True Space" to make space look truly dark, without any indirect illumination at the shadowed side of things.

I love landing on a moon that is just void of any life or human settlements, and just appreciate exploring it's geology or looking at how space looks from its surface. I never did that before. I'm just a tourist, delivering cargo from A to B and exploring the galaxy after putting my real-life kids to bed, and I love it!

With this newfound appreciation, here's what I still think Starfield could be enhanced with to really make it the best version of itself, for me:

First, bring the functionality from True Seamless Grav Jumps and Astrogate to the main game. It makes such a difference. And somehow make it possible to do a more immersive space to surface transition and vice versa. I'm not asking for seamless manned flight to the surface, but I'm hoping for a way to get there while never leaving the cockpit view (or that I can walk around my ship during the sequence). Ideally an autopiloted transition. For a planet with atmosphere, cloud cover and VFX from the heat shield can be used to hide the loading, and for moons I'm totally fine with details on the surface popping in.

Finally, I'm not saying Starfield should be a sim, like Elite Dangerous, or take the immersive elements to the point of Star Citizen. But, giving it a bit more love in that department elevates every other part of the game. More than that, it gives them purpose, and grounds them in a believable, incredibly vast galaxy, that I could never appreciate the scale of before.