A very full day of admin today. In the night I realised how precarious the digital world is, and that my music in particular, like my PC games, a huge proportion of my life's output as an artist and human, are extremely ephemeral. Should I die today, my music would probably vanish from the internet and world forever. Many albums exist only as single copies on my computer or on CD. In the early 2000s I used to sell a few albums, but even the most popular will number under 20 in the world as a whole. I wonder how many of those still function or new reside in people's music collections?
The world is indeed more ephemeral than ever. Even this blog could vanish in an instant. What will happen to our YouTube videos when we die? Google's policy is to delete all emails and data after 2 dormant years. Perhaps the policy lasts longer for YouTube, but surely, it can't forever.
A first act today was to put more of my music on Bandcamp, a continuation of yesterday. I did think of putting even old and deleted albums on there, like the (three!) former versions of Synaesthesia for example, or the Harlequin Kings album, but perhaps that is silly because those old albums were deleted for a reason. Much as I love Kate Bush's Phoenix Recordings, mine aren't as good, and perhaps more importantly, have been re-recorded with better versions.
I really need to make more CDs, more physical albums. This is expensive, but that is perhaps the point. People don't do this anymore due to this expense. It's only in the past few years, since 2017 or so, that the quantity of music exploded online due to new and cheaper ways of mass-releasing it, but this lack of attention span encourages ephemerality. Many forms of art are perhaps on this thin ice, the fickle internet.
My music has undergone a revolution this year, and this continues. The Salome album made great technical leaps. I was reminded today that I made the same leaps with Cycles & Shadows in 2016, a similar time-span and amount of changes to Prometheus (gosh! 6 years since those changes, I've nearly made 100 revisions to it!). I'm more able than ever to make better music than ever, for art reasons. This music is and had become an important part of my artistic output. In some cases (like parts of The Love Symphony) it's had more than a million online streams, yet all ephemeral. Only a handful of the CD copies have been distributed.
As well as Bandcamp admin, I've listed the Salome album in a few other places, and defined a new way of filing my albums by media. I've made several types of CD over the years. In the early days, late 1990s, early 2000s, I burned my own CD-R discs and used local printers to print simple paper inserts, the best I could do regarding colour. Many early albums were made in this way, and I have one copy of each of them, but I suspect that few have survived. REV Records had a few copies of the 1999 version of Synaesthesia like that, but they would have either sent them back or destroyed them.
After that I used a 3rd party printer to print the CD tray and booklet, but burned and assembled the CD-R discs myself. Most of the 2000-2010 era albums were made like this; The Spiral Staircase, The Twelve Seasons, Stupid Computer Music, The End and The Beginning (copies of which crop up on eBay now for £35 or so).
After that, The Love Symphony, Cycles & Shadows and The Anatomy of Emotions were commercially replicated, but still on CD-R I think, which is common for small-run CD duplication. The printing was as good, certainly more convenient. The on-disc printing was never very good. After that, I switched to a better (quality) company and since then all of my CD albums have been printed to the best quality, a transparent case, '8-page' booklet, and on-disc and tray printing. The on-disc printing is still not brilliant, but it will do.
I've noted all of these formats, and which albums and how many copies used them. I've generally kept track of it all, but the record is far from perfect. Still, it will hopefully be better from now on. One thing I will do is keep track of these vital physical items. Oh (and I've lamented this many times) for a new physical audio standard!
