Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
Tom Williams from the band Stray From The Path:
No-one gives a fuck about first-week numbers anymore, anyway. People care more about finding the record at your merch desk for the first time and buying it right then. I clearly remember asking (our label, SharpTone Records), ‘Why do people pre-order records?’ and being met with a minute of silence.
Olivia Rafferty briefly met Ilan Kelman, a Professor of Disasters and Health at UCL, after her talk about Pop Music and Geology. They met recently:
When I sat down with Ilan, I asked him: “what is the one thing related to your research that you wish the wider public knew?” and he said, “there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster.’ There is just nature.”
Listen to Olivia’s music right here:
Today is Bandcamp Friday, where Bandcamp waives their 15% fee of each digital purchase, putting more money into the pockets of artists.
To mark this occasion, I’ve made all my HUNTERTHEN music “pay what you want” for the day. Pay nothing, pay a dollar, pay $10, the choice is yours.
I’m a third generation musician. I joined my first band in high school playing my mom’s bass. But in recent years I just wanted to listen to music to fall asleep to, yet always had trouble finding the music that was just right. So I started making it myself, and have seven releases.
You can find my music in a few Noah Kalina videos, which is a huge honor for me.
Over two hours of mixing and scratching and … whatever else they’re doing? Sooo good.
From the 2015 release “Hide Time,” on Cannibald Records.
Like Rick Rubin once said, “make stuff, and show it to your friends.”
This is operational, minimal, quietly persistent. Music for background processing.
This is what I want to hear, so I figured out how to make it. This is my seventh release, and I’m still learning how to create and shape these releases.
All sounds made on a Novation Bass Station II, recorded and mixed in Abelton Live, and the final full mix (available as a paid download only) is made with my minimal DJ browser app.
For licensing inquiries (films, videos, podcasts, installations) please get in touch.
Modern DJ software is bloated, and way too much for what I need, so I built this minimal DJ web app with Google’s Gemini + ChatGPT. It’s an HTML page that I load locally into Google Chrome with keyboard and midi controls.
I need this to make mixes of my HUNTERTHEN music, available to those who buy the full albums on Bandcamp. I make “soundscapes for your interplanetary commute,” which will either lull you to sleep or help you get your work done.
Next on my shopping list is something like this, the GRID3 PBF4 4-Button + Pot + Fader MIDI Controller. I really only need two sliders, but having four will be nice, and the extra buttons can be mapped to start / stop each track.
A blog is a wonderful time capsule, for both the good and the bad. This from a recent email newsletter from the German band Elder:
Unfortunately, the timing for this release coincides with the change in tariff policies of the US government. Our (Stickman, based in Germany) uses a number of services to ensure the cheapest possible worldwide shipping, but all of them are currently not servicing the US while they re-tool themselves to handle the current situation.
As such, before these tariffs went into effect we only managed to get 100 copies of the EP into the US! If you are in the States and want to get your hands on one, you will need to order either via Armageddon Shop or Echodelic, both of which have only 50 copies.
We know that techincally tariffs shouldn’t affect vinyl as it falls under the banner of “informational materials”. Our shipping partners are not currently servicing the US and our hands are tied. Apologies for that.
Hope to look back on this post five years from now and shake my head at the current state of political affairs.
And holy heck, that album art is soooo good.
You have to be on the streaming platforms!
The streaming platforms:
Deezer says it now receives over 30,000 fully AI-generated tracks daily, marking a sharp increase from the 20,000 figure it reported in April and the 10,000 it disclosed in January when it first launched its proprietary AI detection tool.
It’s hard enough to stand out from the crowds on the social media platforms when competing with actual musicians and bands. Now you throw in 30,000 AI-generated tracks EVERY DAY and you’re just buying lottery tickets and hoping for the best, you’re literally swimming upstream just trying to buy those lottery tickets in the first place.
Go play shows. Busk. Stream live. Do whatever you gotta do to get in front of actual humans, create fans, get their email address, rinse and repeat for years.
The beauty about keeping a blog is you have an archive about certain subject and quotes from certain people.
I’m hosting Sean Cannon today (Aug 21, 2025) on my Escape Pod Zoom call, a weekly gathering of the paid members of my Social Media Escape Club.
I searched his name on this blog, and found this post “Streaming Problems,” from January of 2020.
I clicked the source link, his Twitter feed, and then found this gem, regarding Spotify:
“So you have the biggest company in the space creating “fake” music to drive up margins, trying to create user habits that promote NOT interacting with artists or their songs, and trying to crowd music out of everyday users lives.”
Oh, how unaware we were at the time at how fake the music would get! He was talking about “fake bands” that made music for a fee, thus removing the royalty aspect. Fill the playlists with “freelance” bands, and profit!
But here we are five years later, and Spotify is littered with music created by AI.
