What Are You Going to Do with It?

Since COVID shut us down locally, some friends and I have been “getting together” to play music  online regularly for about 4 1/2 years. It began when a couple of us, who had been getting together once a week at the local music store for a few hours of round-the-circle music, wanted to keep something like that going while the world was shutdown. We started out fumbling around with Zoom and the other online meeting platforms, but they are all half-duplex (like cell phones) and that is pretty hopeless for music. Eventually, one of us found Jamkazam and we used that for two years. Weirdly, when Jamkazam started charging for the service in January of 2021 the program and support went to hell. We paid for it for a year, as a group, but eventually quit fighting and moved over to Sonobus, which is still free as of now. Both platforms allowed us to record our music and we shared the duties of organizing the performances/takes into recording sessions. Sonobus turned out to be massively better for recording purposes than Jamkazam.

Now, almost 4 1/2 years later, we have managed to record sixteen original songs written by one-to-three of our group and twenty-five covers. A while back, I took to putting all of our stuff on the USB sticks that provide the background music in our two vehicles and I’ve had a great time showing off what we’ve done to friends, family, and other victims who happen to find themselves in my car. I put one of the first songs I’d written and we’d recorded on YouTube and, mostly, re-discovered how much I hate video editing in the process:

In a fit of ego and silliness, I put about half of my compositions and productions up on Distrokid last year and made about $8 in streaming “income” from a $10 initial fee. I did my annual purge of credit card re-enlistments and I’ve been getting Distrokid warnings (“UPDATE: Your music is at risk of being deleted”) on a weekly basis since that initial subscription ran out. A friend who is much more committed to promoting his music said I actually did “pretty well,” but for most of us bothering with streaming distribution is obviously more about ego than anything else. All I have to do is look in the mirror and my ego is busted to bits. I am old. The normal Distrokid price is $20/year and that’s just silly and Distrokid is the cheapest way I’ve found to get nearly universal music streaming distribution.

About 40 years ago, after 15 years of being all sorts of bands and blowing my wad on owning a sound company and recording studio, a friend (Mike) called me with an “exciting opportunity” to be lead guitarist for a band he was assembling. Mike’s band had serious promotion, gigs lined up, and financial backing. I was well into my career as an electronics engineer, about half-way through my zillion-year attempt to get a college degree, and had just moved my family to Omaha, Nebraska. I was burned out from beating my head against the local and semi-national music scene and in a bad mode.

“So, what you’re asking is do I want to leave my family for several weeks while we woodshed somewhere putting together a line-up, spend a bunch of money on equipment I just got through selling, drive a few hundred miles every night for six months, every night haul a ton of equipment up or down stairs to the gig, set everything up in an hour or so, maybe cram down a bar burger before the show, play music I don’t like for three hours for a crowd I won’t like, tear everything down and haul it up or down stairs, load the trailer, probably sleep in the van half the time on the way to the next gig, and take my shif driving about the time I finally start to fall asleep? All that to, maybe, clear $5,000?” I pretty much delivered that soliloquy in one breath without thinking.

Mike was quiet for a bit. “You could have just said ‘no.’”

“Sorry, Mike. I probably didn’t know that would be the answer until I was about half-way through that rant. But, yeah, no. I’m good. I hope your blow ‘em away and have a great tour, Mike. Thanks for thinking of me.” We signed off pretty quickly and I didn’t hear from Mike again until several years later when he was in a similar situation with a band in Denver. That band wanted to record two of my songs—”Down on the Beach” and “I’m Gonna Quit”—without paying me anything for the publication rights. I passed on that “opportunity for exposure,” too.

Other than as a technician, I was pretty much done with the music business by 50. I was a technology instructor at a music college for 13 years, but if students were looking for an encouraging word about making a living in music they went to someone else. When a friend listened to one of our latest recordings, he asked “So what are you going to do with all that material?”

“Listen to it, enjoy the memories, share it with friends and family.”

“You don’t want to try to sell it? Put it on the Internet? Maybe put a band together and play this stuff for an audience?”

“Oh hell no! I’m happy that we managed to put up with each other for so long. I love putting on a set of headphones and recalling the feeling of playing with these guys over these past 4 years.” I told him about my experience with Distrokid. “There are a lot easier ways to lose $10 a year and more fun, too.

“And I definitely don’t want to be in a band ever again.” And I explained to him why, “Again, I can find easier ways to lose money than playing gigs. This is one of my hobbies and one that I enjoy. I’m not going to do anything to mess that up.”