u/noms_de_plumes

So, I was looking at another post on the musicians sub and started to think about this.

A lot of musicians out there are somewhat fixated on music marketing strategies online, I think, and I just don't think that most of them are relevant to their current level of success.

Somewhat notoriously, musicians make an average of $0.004 per stream on Spotify. That's a grand total of $4,000 per million streams. You'd need seven and a half times that annually to even be making what is barely even a living wage at $15 an hour before tax.

On SoundCloud, musicians make on average $0.0025 to $0.004 per stream. SoundCloud is, of course, a bit different in purpose than Spotify, which is how it has skirted a bit of the flak in this regard, but, it's, anyways, slightly, but significantly actually less than Spotify.

Perhaps, for someone with different interests, it could be a bit more, but, on my bandcamp fan page, the highest number of sales in a given collection is around 1,000. Even if every person, which probably doesn't usually happen, pays $20 for the album, that's still only $20,000, which obviously wouldn't be coming in annually.

YouTube will pay between $0.001 and $0.005 per stream for a music video, which, again, is comparable to Spotify.

In the best of all possible worlds, if an act has multiple albums on bandcamp which are selling well, say, for a total of $10,000, je ne sais pas, three million YT views in a given year for $9,000, and another four million streams total on SC and Spotify for $14,000, that's still just barely over $30K at $33K and it's also probably entirely lacking in sustainability.

So, even if they're really quite lucky, most musicians just aren't making any real money online.

Yet, many musicians are rather concerned with trying to figure out how to game these kind of music marketing data matrixes. What I have to wonder is as to why.

The most plausible explanation is that they just don't know that sharing your music online is not generally profitable.

Another possible explanation is that they suspect that it still somehow matters. It may, and I am sure, on some level, does, matter to a major record label or their subsidiaries because they look at these statistics to try and figure out what has a good chance of success. Independent labels, to a lesser degree, may also do the same.

The thing about this, however, is that very few labels, major or otherwise, even accept demos and, if they do accept demos, it's more out of a general curiosity than it is to realistically find bands whom they're terribly willing to sign. To my own personal experience and general madness, I feel like I can say this with relative certainty.

If your online portfolio is only going to matter so much for your demo submission and the submissions are mostly pointless, anyways, the only way you're realistically going to be breaking out is either if you know someone already or a scout shows up at one of your shows.

Assuming that you don't know anyone, which, if you did, why would you care about any of this, what you're effectively still banking on is being and the right place in the right time and putting on a good show.

So, rather than concerning yourself with maximalizing your online presence at all, what you ought to be doing is what every moderately successful musician tells you to be doing, which is to create good music, play good shows, and to reasonably promote them.

All that your online presence is going to do for you is to cast a wider net of people who will either know or discover who you are before coming to see you live. True internet sensations are all too few and far between.

So, assuming that the real goal ought to be to get people in the venue when you play out, what, then, is "reasonable" promotion?

If you're playing local shows, you should make a flier for the show and post it around the city. You should also scan said flier, post it on your own pages, a community page or two that is designed for people to promote events like this, and, if the venue does not have a website or has not done so on their own social media account already and is also willing to let you do so, on their wall or whatever as well. If you play an open mic, you can also mention it briefly. That's basically it. It costs very little and should only take about a day or so. If you're music is good and you put on a good show, people will come out. As you play more and more, you might be able to get into larger venues, in which case, things may change, but, until you've become established within a given scene, there's just little to no need for you to consider any marketing aspects aside from the base DIY minimum.

What's good about having a music video on YouTube, uploading your music to bandcamp or SoundCloud, or whatever else is that it lets people out there engage with your music before coming to the show. No music marketing metrics are going to matter to you unless you've already come out of an established scene and are now a successful touring musician. You could be the next MIA, I guess, but it's really a pretty goddamn longshot.

Over-marketing is also just a bit off-putting. If someone invites me to a show at an open mic, I'll consider going to it, but, if they tell me to follow them on Instagram, then I will surely never respect them as a musician ever again.

Maybe I'm just a purist, though, idk?

In many ways, the Trump administration seems as if it should fly in the face of a conservative ethos. President Donald Trump, a crass and candid magnate and former reality television star, has no legitimate claim to authority. He is neither respectful nor respect worthy. He is evidently corrupt and self-serving. He has little regard for the rule of law or the separation of powers and, to just about everyone paying any form of attention, he appears to be more or less amoral.

Yet, such things can be readily disregarded through an appeal to the social equivalent of martial necessity.

It doesn't matter that Trump's mode of conduct is comparable to a low-level mob boss, let alone how it is that he conducts himself at all, because, for the fanatics on the American Right, Trump's actions are considered "necessary".

As to just what they are "necessary" for, that depends upon the conservative faction, but the problem with much of the American Right is not some form of ignorance of the disjunct between their own stated values and the current administration's moral conduct, i.e. it is not that they are just too stupid to see that he just simply enjoys acting like a little tyrant; it almost exclusively relates to what they're willing to sacrifice in the beaten way of strategy.

They believe for American society to "need" a strong and guileful hand in things like the "restoration of Christian values", the maintenance of our "territorial integrity", that we should be a bastion of "peace and security", or, in what was formerly characterized by the notion of a "city on a hill", some mythic model for other "great" nations to take heed of and follow.

As the current president has a peculiar knack for populist rhetoric, lacking in decorum as he may be, they don't necessarily mind for the so-called "miracle" of dictatorship to been made manifest by a man who carries himself about as well as most of the politically incorrect subreddit on 4chan.

For them, too, hypocrisy in politics is radically unsurprising. The problem is not that they can not see that Donald Trump is a hypocrite. The problem is that they believe that granting that hypocrite more and more power is an acceptable means to achieve their ends.

Not so much as here but elsewhere online, much of the strategy in opposition to the current administration has been to point out his apparent hypocrisy. We need to reorient our strategy in both, instead, critiquing those ends, and, much more importantly, in consideration of what is categorically unacceptable, namely dictatorial means.

tl;dr:

Say what you will about Giorgio Agamben but it's high key time to start thinking about the state of exception bc they're not amoral; just Machiavellian fanatics.

It speaks for itself.

So, so far I've watched Love Game in Eastern Fantasy, Pursuit of Jade, Veil of Shadows, Love Till the End of the Moon, Love Between Fairy and Devil, Love in the Clouds, and am currently making my way through Nirvana in Fire. I plan to watch the 1994 Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Love like the Galaxy, The First Frost, and Blossoms Shanghai next.

I just sort of fell into and in love with C-drama via Netflix on accident. Normally, I tend to watch a lot of stuff on the Criterion Channel aside from anime, and, so, East Asian soaps are a bit out of my element.

Since I've seen or plan to see a lot of C-dramas, I'm curious as to recs from other parts of the region as I've only so far otherwise seen the K-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo and the Japanese comedy, 99.9: Criminal Lawyer.

I came here looking for TV shows, but since I'm also into film, if you have any recs in that regard, I'd be open to them as well. I really like the films of Edward Yang, War Kong Wai, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi, as well as Battle Royale, Tetsuo: the Iron Man, Oldboy, Xiao Wu or Pickpocket (1997), Perfumed Nightmare, An Elephant Sitting Still, and Throw Away Your Books and Rally in the Streets.

I'd also recommend more or less everything mentioned so far to just about anyone.

Mainly, though, I just came here to find some good East Asian soaps. Gimme your recs, all!

It doesn't matter that antifa, as if such a loosely affiliated set of groups could be characterized as operating as a singular organization, can, at times, be engaged in foolish praxis, such as their relentless doxxing wars with the far-Right, or reckless conduct, such as deluding themselves into believing that they can actually win a street fight against ripped neo-fascists. What is important is of the obvious dangers which far-Right terrorism presents, something that antifa notably lacks almost entirely.

For the most part, people quote unquote in antifa are young anarchists or communists who spend their time milling about radical bookstores, engaged in grassroots organization, playing in punk bands, going to silent yoga, taking up self-defense courses, or slapping the Iron Front logo over far-Right stickers and tags on any given street sign in the city. If you've ever had the fortune of seeing Brass Against live, the people you might've seen there with all of the political buttons on their messenger bags are more or less who this infamous antifa actually is. They neither pose a significant threat to the security of the United States of America nor are they organized in such a manner to be considered as an organization. Anyone who sharpies an Iron Front logo on their notebook or slaps a sticker on their laptop can be considered as a member of antifa.

This is well-known and widely discussed amongst radicals. Though I certainly don't frequent such circles enough, let alone at all, to have empirical evidence in this regard, I would consider it a safe assumption to suggest that it is also well-known within the security services as well. While the Right in general may be willing to lie to themselves for long enough about just who antifa is to believe in almost any conspiracy theory, the people who actually monitor them surely know just who they actually are and what they're actually like. They must, too, realize that they do not pose a legitimate threat to the security of the United States.

Recently, the Trump administration has categorized antifa as a major terrorist organization, effectively along the lines of the Islamic State. That same administration has also been willfully omittant in its efforts to counter what, statistically, poses the greatest threat to American security, namely far-Right terrorism.

For many, this is merely the "abuse of power" which "comes as no surprise". Given my own knowledge of both the actions and allegations of our own intelligence service over the years, I certainly am not shocked by that the current administration should engage in such stratagems.

I am, however, concerned. Because this is an "injury to one" which really is an "injury to us all", I really believe that "this concerns everyone."

It is obviously concerning that more or less any resistance to fascism, let alone, perhaps, even authoritarianism in general, has not only potentially been criminalized, but also potentially been criminalized in such a manner wherein our security apparatus can operate more or less without legal oversight, let alone even within the scope of international law. It is, perhaps, even more concerning that the justification for such a legal or extra-juridical machination is predicated upon an obvious lie.

If such operative mechanisms fail to be curtailed, absurd as it may be or sound, this will become the line in the sand between democracy and dictatorship, and it is a line which they have clearly indicated to us that they are willing to cross.

As to what there is to be done, I can only vainly hope that some people in some position of power somewhere have already realized that now is the time to hit the breaks and that some other people somehow out there can somehow get the word out such that it is not only known that the peril of this crisis is quite real, but also felt, but I'm certainly otherwise open ideas, as I don't want to wait forty years before the kind of authoritarian regime our intelligence service is notorious for backing in the Global South collapses due to its own inertia and I can finally speak about this freely again.