Friday was about singing vocals for 'Another Dead Morning', the release of The Arcangel Soundtrack, the Castle Park 20x20 Art Preview in the evening.
Saturday, the immense and overwhelming work of music admin continued. I've decided to re-list my work on Spotify. I've taken most of my work off there, but retained a few tracks to keep that relationship alive. There are many reasons not to use the platform. They don't pay for under 1000 streams, but do take money for those and give it to other successful artists (which is even less fair than them simply keeping it). This I dislike as a fundamental injustice, but I presume they do this because most people listen for free, so they also expect most artists to give their music for free. I would hope that, should they make money, they will reward the artists at the bottom, even if past behaviour indicates otherwise.
Another reason I dislike the platform is false accusations of 'fake streaming' without grounds for appeal or evidence, and with instant and irrevocable harsh punishments. Most artists, it appears, accused of 'fake streaming' are innocent victims who've had their track picked up by a bot or a 'fake playlist'. It's easy, for example, for a big label (or anyone with a grudge) to 'fake stream' a rival track and have it removed and the artist reprimanded or even permanently banned. I suspect that this form of attack is big business, and that this is not discouraged, or even sought out or documented, by Spotify. This is a larger injustice than the first point; but both are related. If any track by a small artists generates royalties, Spotify refuse to pay, keep the money, and ban the track or artist!
But these injustices aside there are reasons to list on Spotify, and the primary one is that it is and remains a, if not the most, popular platform for music streaming. They do some things well. Their 'Spotify for Artists' feature was among the first (before Apple for Artists, before Tidal for Artists, before Deezer for Creators etc.). The single track link for music across countries beats Apple. They have a social aspect. Ultimately, a few small features that other streamers still lack, and ultimately all artists are in the same boat, so we must simply put up with unfair behaviour by those in power as better than nothing. People tend to pick a favourite platform and listen there. If their favourite artist isn't there they probably won't seek him elsewhere, and listeners or fans care nothing about the policies of each platform.
All of this means I need to create more Spotify Canvases (a feature I like), including new ones for The Arcangel Soundtrack and The Dusty Mirror. The Arcangel videos each used variations of the full videos, simple loops for the most part.
The Dusty Mirror was a little more challenging, but often used variations of the videos.
For 'The Arm', I used a waving arm. The actual video there is just a lyric video.
A few of the other canvases I've made in the past were 240 frames at 30 frames-per-sec, that is exactly 8 seconds, which was the limit. Now the limit is under 8 seconds, which instantly invalidated half or more of all of my canvases by a tiny fraction of a second (annoying!). I could speed them up to 31 FPS, though I feel like hand crafting them to my new format of 24 FPS and 192 frames. That task alone would take a week or two.
