Listeners don’t buy music, Fans Do: Bandcamp

MUSIC+COMIC on “People don’t buy music” and Bandcamp. 

Music here is 7 String guitar, Synths and Drums put together in Reaper DAW. Still using the POD Express GO purely as a App/Cab simulator, The ANVIL amp and Kali 4x12 cabinet.

Have had a Bandcamp account since 2011 and a Soundcloud account much longer,  were we put out original music on the Internet.  Neither of these places are where “ordinary people” go to listen to music, despite artists like TANGERINE DREAM & DEVLIN TOWNSEND having their whole catalogs available to play and even buy and download.

Spotify is were the majority of “ordinary people”, listeners, stream music. They don’t go anywhere else, and it seems, rarely do anything but select a music genre.  Very like a Radio station back in the 1970s, were the station you selected determined what of POP, ROCK, CLASSICAL, JAZZ, EASY LISTENING or TALK, you would hear. 

Bandcamp doesn’t charge anything for an account, and you can upload your music and even sell downloads and real merchandise/ CDs/ Vinyl.  Listeners can play any of the music there for free too.

SPOTIFY charges to put music on it, and an Indie artist has to use a subscription service like the owned by SPOTIFY Discokid to get their music into Spotify.  For the majority, those fees are more than they ever get from Listener plays.  So for the many it is a PAY TO BE PLAYED system to access the largest audience. There is a huge number of music tracks uploaded daily there now, and with almost instant AI music generation it is probably way more now. 

Many do this  PAY TO BE PLAYED thing. 

I don’t. 

I have read of an artist testing the viability of Bandcamp compared to Spotify, Apple Music and the other streaming services and found, using paid FACEBOOK advertising and the audience that implies, that even if he offered FREE DOWNLOADS of his Bandcamp music, no one would even bother to visit Bandcamp.  If it wasn’t on the service they already used, they wouldn’t go elsewhere, even if free. But this targets “Listeners”, not “Music Fans”.

But then:

Fans have paid artists $1.62 billion
 using Bandcamp, and yesterday
 alone bought 78,852 records.

Part of the disconnect in this is that FACEBOOK is not a platform where advertising, or anything else is trusted anymore, and has turned to total garbage for users and advertisers.  People I know rarely post any personal things there any more.  I don't.

No one buys music anymore has to be prefaced by “ordinary people” or “Listeners”.  

Fans do buy music, merchandise, CDs and Vinyl. I do. I know people that do. The “Listeners” don’t care particularly about music and don’t buy it either, but pay for the convenience of Spotify without advertisements.

For a musicians to sell music, they need to have “fans” though.  Many musicians now have YouTube Channels and spend much time making video content, rather than original music, to build their fan base.  I think this is like the X Factor Singing Contests, where views end up focusing on getting behind their personal stories and personality, rather than the actual music. Secondary things. 
    Rick Beato says that is the way it is now, which maybe so, but I think they aren’t being musicians any more, but YouTube entertainers.  They will get more views of a video unboxing a guitar than they will of one on any of their music!

I haven’t gone the Spotify route, and only have my material on YouTube and Bandcamp.   I don’t see a bigger “possible” audience as something worth paying for. I made an ebook years ago and put it on Amazon, “the biggest possible market”, and have seen that by itself doesn’t help sell a very niche book.  What I do is “niche” and not “mass market” at all.  

Other Things

ZOOTOPIA was last weeks Friday night movie and I thought it was really well done.  Bullying,  Discrimination and trying to make a difference. The voice acting was amazing.

It used to be a post on X was visible for about 18 minutes before vanishing into the endless time line, but if you are using a free account, think it is much less than that now, and disappears almost immediately. X is being very insistent I should get a Premium account, always saying how many/few the reach of my posts was and guess they have made the reach even worse as an "incentive".  No way!
    A YouTube Short seems to be using a related algorithm now and is put out into the stream for about an hour, if it doesn’t get enough of it viewed before being swiped away, and you are not in the “favored creator” group. The time it is released is also thus so important to the number of views it gets, and have to say I don’t like that at all.  Even those that make stupid thumbnail images are annoyed at how important a stupid thumbnail image is. 

The last Manben neo was on mangaka Chica Umino, and my second hand copy from 2008 of  MARCH COMES IN LIKE A LION #1 has arrived so I can check out this work. It is filled with Shogi, emotion, internal, external and spoken dialog. I will see what I can learn and apply to my own future works. 

Bought and downloaded the 320kbps TANGERINE DREAM - BOTANIQUE ORANGERIE SESSION 2022   Love this, particularly when the sequencers are running. A break from ASTERISM and my own recent tracks.

That Fairlight Instruments ex staff get together has turned into a much bigger 50th Anniversary celebration, but I joke I will still only be in 720p.  Doing this interview   made me realize I don’t remember much about those days, and am a terrible interview subject.

Received a Christmas Comic/ Card from a friend on their good and bad of 2025. Travel, surgery, exhibitions and funerals for 5 friends.  Some don’t live long enough to have the experiences of the elders. So now feel we should be grateful to have these things happen to us.

Watched a very interesting Steve Vai with Billy Corgan Interview in his, The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan. Would be better if Corgan didn’t interrupt his guest so much, but it gave me new insight into Steve. I haven’t been a music fan. I have a G3 Tokyo DVD with Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and John Petrucci and always found Steves’s stuff less interesting to me.  Skilled but lacking something to keep my interest.  Have just bought his 1990 Passion & Warfare, and maybe that will change me.  

It is truly shocking to see what is super popular on Social Media and YouTube. So much stupid garbage, and after seeing what the American school education system is like, leave no child behind, it is no wonder. 

The year is rushing to a conclusion and we have our plans for over the year end/ New Year set with our grandson and his parents staying with us again. Doing the grandparents thing. 

Expect many will be holidays now or soon too. I have one more MUSIC+COMIC ready to upload and a Mixed Media Missive to go with it, and that may be the last for 2025. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Fairlight Instruments 50th Anniversary: The Origin Of Sampling and Music Workstations

 

Fairlight Instruments just turned 50! In August (or September) 1975, Fairlight Instruments Pty Ltd was incorporated. Then other stuff happened.

To mark this occasion, many of the Fairlight alumni are gathering in Sydney on Friday the 19th of December to celebrate formation of this remarkable and influential company.

We have over seven (and probably more) original employees who will be joining the event virtually from all corners of the earth. Dozens more will be there in person, including many special invited guests. In many cases, these Fairlight alumni will not have seen each other in decades. Remarkably, in many other cases, we remain in constant personal and business contact, 40 years after working together in our early careers.

A website, fairlight50.au has been set up and (hopefully in the coming days) there will be an opportunity leave greeting messages and a place to share stories and memories.

We will be recording the event and compiling a video that will be posted on the website, along with photos and other media from the occasion.

If you worked at Fairlight or had a close association with Fairlight Instruments, especially in the early days and have not already been contacted, we'd love to hear from you! Please get in touch ASAP.

 

Let's all join in celebrating the golden jubilee of Fairlight.

So there will a get together in Sydney at Cicada Innovations December Friday 19th 2025 to celebrate the company and what it became with staff, customers and well wishers.   

I will be ZOOMing in from Kyoto, as will a few others, I have been told. Not the most interesting way to attend a party I expect and I have never been a party person either.

I am proud of what I did there 1981 till 1986.  But it was only 6 years early in my career. Forgotten many of the details of what I worked on now too.  But I achieved far more technically than I did in 15 years at Roland Japan... 

I threw away all the memorabilia like copies of my hand drawn schematics and lab note books 7 years ago now during downsizing to move back to Japan. So I have nothing much to show or jog my memory of what happened when, other than a few photos, unsorted in a box.

Had kept the info for so long and found no one cared, until now. Too late.

There are a few people very nostalgic for the machines, but I am not like that at all. Even when I worked there, I had little access to a machine and never used one once my initial year involved in testing and assembling customer machines was over.  What I used for development was just the computer part of a CMI in a RACK, never a whole CMI. 

Loved what artists like Jean Michel Jarre, Mike Oldfield and everyone else did with them though, and collected those albums. 

A 4 track cassette recorder, guitar, bass, drum machine and synth were my own musical direction then.  Not really so much different from now, other than being all in for PC based music production using the Reaper DAW.

But the first products Fairlight made were things like the SLEEPING DOG CAR ALARM. Not as glamorous as later things were to be. 

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

Speed In Manga

 

 MUSIC+COMIC on speed produced with a few lines and a lot of skill, around mostly car comics. But speed goes with action, and that is a major component of the Shonen Manga market,  Yowamushi Pedal is part of.  

I applied a few of the techniques displayed in these pages to my own THE SHADOW car racing team comic.   

But it is the music track that is the focus in this. Fast, happy with a bit of a melody. Heavy guitar tone, very metal, but the rest makes it the simple rock genre, I think, if you want to put a label on it.  The bass sequencer is just a pedal note here, but it helps push it along, as does the upper register sequencer rhythm pattern that comes in the 16 bar sections the melody doesn’t play in. 

I tried a few different voices for the spoken word ON YOUR MARK, GET SET, GO!  Settled on this “batman”, raspy sound rather than my normal speaking voice.  

It isn’t a track done for “guitarists”. Think Steve VIA or Joe Satriani. That is so much about showing off technique. My thing here is just about simple riffs.

I continue to make a continuous DJ like music track of the last 30 minutes of music I have made and play that on repeat when out regularly. It gives me some perspective on what I have made, as I completely forget about something I made a 5+ weeks ago and worry I may just all be remaking the same track over and over again. Even if it does change from being in C to G to F to A every so often. I do think it is time for a change though!

Other Things

Our website is being visited by nothing but spammers, bots and AI content scrappers now at the end of 2025. I get a lot of email SPAM, but have had fewer email inquires this year than in the last 13. 

Google has changed its Analytics again, but the last 15 years of organic search looks something like this curve, with the red line showing the declining usefulness of Google as a search engine, ending with the site mostly visited by bots and skimmers.

  In 2010 it was looking like I could do illustration stuff full-time, and Adsense even paid for more than just my hosting fees. Then Google changed things (their on going BAIT & SWITCH) and for almost 12 months got very little incoming work. During that time I realized Google had made a website based business possible, but it was impossible to rely on Google for you living from it.   You can see from the graph, it dropped to that same level again in 2017 and has gotten worse since.  

I think the same thing is happening to YouTubers. FranLab coined the term “de-algorithmized” were it doesn’t matter what content is made, a channel or website doesn’t warrant  recommending over other “more profitable for Google” sites and channels. Probably more than a few YouTubers that made money previously, can't any more.

I check every so often that the contact us pages still works, and it always does. Within the last few weeks I saw an Illustration YouTuber reporting that even well known working   Illustrators have had work requests fall off a cliff this year. So it isn’t just me, and I am glad I am retired and don’t need that pocket money now. Seems the category “Illustration”  has been “de-algorithmized”. 

I expect this is partly as Google’s AI answers in search don’t direct people to websites any more, present sponsored content, and prospective customers are probably also just trying to use AI to make their pictures. I have tried a few times to get AI to make some images, and mostly they weren’t very useful.

Still think Illustration is my main thing though, but really haven’t done much of that this year. The music stuff has been most engrossing. A few times I think of something I would like to illustrate, then think of the tedium involved in working out the details, and then don’t start as it all seems “too much trouble”. My eyes aren’t as good as they were either, and that is significant as I start such a thing on paper with pencil. So I go back to the music stuff. I have this feeling in the back of my mind I have to make music while I still can, before Arthritis or something else makes it too hard. 

With posting just my MUSIC+COMICS on Sunday morning for the time being, I have been keeping off X and Facebook more.  Those places seem far less useful and engaging now.

KRAFTWERK will perform in Osaka April 28 2026. I have always liked Kraftwerk and was interested enough to look up ticket prices and what the recent concerts look like.  Big video screen with 4 guys in illuminating costumes standing at keyboard consoles. And that is it. No chat, may as well be 4 dummies on stage, as they only move walking onto and off the stage at the start and end. So I think I will just stay home and play the KRAFTWERK CDs instead, even if die hard fans think it is worth it. 

The October ASTERISM concert I attended has a few videos on YouTube now.  

  There was a young women with a handheld camera rig that took them. She looked like she was involved with the band, could have even been a parent. I was a little behind and to the left of her, and this is almost the view I had of the show too. The small KYOTO MOJO live house is more my thing than a KRAFTWERK concert.   

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

The Son Of The AMP Modeler That Ate My Wallet

 

All feels like Déjà vu. 

Amp Captures and Cabinet IRs "FEELS" all like SAMPLING was in the 1980s. Large collections of captures/samples and not being able to find or change what you have.   Feel Modelers/ Synthesizers will not be forgotten for long, and having the most "realistic" amp/cabinet sound will not be as shiny as it is now.

Neural AMP Modeler (NAM) is pretty cool, but getting "your sound" is by downloading and trying out lots of different files, rather than turning a few knobs in a modeler.  That it is free must have really impacted many companies in that space.

Such as the TONEX ONE for example, is a tiny hardware pedal that is very much like the NAM. It is not free though. You download up to 20 amp/cabinets or distortion pedals/overdrives into it and can switch between them. 

A problem (but some see it as a feature!) is there are 1000s to choose from, and there is that FEAR OF MISSING OUT, that you haven't tried the latest files, as "they maybe better". 

I think I prefer the sound I have using the ANVIL amp in my POD Express Black at the moment though.  A modeler, not a capture of a real AMP/Cabinet setup. 

But I also don't think of myself as a guitarist. 

Other Things

Was contacted yesterday about an ex Fairlight Instruments get together in Sydney Friday afternoon Jan 19th.  Last chance "while we are all still alive".  Myself and a few other will ZOOM it to Sydney. Last time I met a few old colleagues was at the memorial for Alan Galt in 2018. I didn't recognize many!    

Avatar 3 hits the cinemas here next week, but I don't think I will go. I didn't see the last one as it required a fair commitment just for the length of it. This one is maybe even longer.  Saw the first one in 3D at the cinema with my two youngest and we all hated the glasses and could not keep wearing them. It wasn't till it was actually on TV that I really watched it.  The VFX may be awesome, but I really don't care at the moment.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN

The Remix

56 second MUSIC+COMIC on remixing, using a remix of last SHORT music.  Lots of gratuitous abstract animation here.  Took over 3 hours, which is a lot for one of these. I just kept on coming up with something else to add to keep it more animated than usual.  Our cat in recent years is my constant companion, and he selected me as his full time live in staff.

Kraftwerk the MIX isn’t the only remix that has impressed me though.  

CAN’T YOU TRIP LIKE I DO    from the SPAWN soundtrack had a real impact, and made me realize a metal version was just as valid an approach as the more common DJ HipHop style.  

Another is CASSIAN’s GREAT SOUTHERN LAND  

And to not forget the remix of Freak Kitchen’s EVERYBODY GETS BLOODY  

Or even the Teddy Riley remix of Jane Child’s I Don't Wanna Fall In Love . 

But all those is too much to put in a 56 second music comic. Far too much text.

I have a 2017 issue of COMPUTER MUSIC with a few articles on THE ART OF REMIXING. None of those ideas mentioned in that are used in this track, except for the arrow and line graphics featured. But very educational otherwise, to a different music world.

I only ever bought 5 issues of COMPUTER MUSIC magazine, but am grateful to the creators. It was the right thing, at the right time for me.  It was the COMPUTER MUSIC SPECIAL 07 2007, THE ULTIMATE FREE HOME STUDIO, with the CD-ROM on the cover that introduced me to the world of VSTs. Buying that magazine was a great investment for me. We had dial up INTERNET and we had exceeded our contracts limit much of the time, so having stuff on CD-ROM was awesome.  

Also pretty much made what hardware manufacturers like Roland were doing irrelevant to me. I think the same thing happened to many other music creators too. 

I updated my POD EXPRESS BLACK presets to have a more aggressive LEAD sound in this and the last track.  I don’t use any of the delay, modulation or reverb options on offer.  Would use a pitch shifter if it had one sometimes though, but the new BOSS Poly Shifter costs more than this whole unit. The Reaper project now also has additional guitar tracks for using my NO CAB presets and adding and mixing cabinet IRs in Reaper.  I have yet to find I use more than 3 presets. My ANVIL sound, and my ANVIL lead sound, and the same without the cabinets.  

Something in my head keeps saying "But maybe you should try the Line6 HX STOMP" but I just know I would only use the same 3 presets. Would it sound better though?  Maybe a little, but no one watching this for a few seconds would care at all!  And as the Yen exchange rate is really poor at the moment, the best price I have seen for it is ¥89,100, which is more than double what I paid for my most expensive guitar, which just screams all kind of wrong priorities to me too. 

YouTube showed me some guys HX STOMP’s 5 favorite guitar amps and the settings he used. Cool, but in the context of a piece of music, It would not make any difference to a listener which “rock guitar” sound he used in original music. But what this is about is how it makes the Player feel, and that impacts the performance, and the listener can probably hear that. Same goes for the guitar itself, and all the other stuff “guitarists” fuss about. 

It seems needing all these different guitar tones is possibly about the different styles of music, and covers, they play.  I don’t really do that,  and am after “my sound”. If I do play a sound alike cover, I still want it to sound like me, so all the guitar sounds on the original songs do not interest me.  

Have put this bit of music on Bandcamp in our Assorted Bits 3 Album.

I had downloaded Neural Amp Modeler and Amp/Cabinet files a few weeks ago and hadn't tried it till today. Here comparing it to AMPSTEIN.  I have never before just recorded straight guitar and then applied the amp/cabinet.  

Neural Amp Modeler gives you the sound of the system that was analyzed. 

Other Things

Last weekend was a long weekend, with Monday a public holiday. I posted the STUDIO VS LIVE Short to You Tube Sunday morning, and Tuesday morning 11AM has had 325 views, so back to the idea a Sunday post is best. 65% of viewers stay to watch the first half.

Drivers License renewed for 5 years. Only 2 hours door today Wednesday morning.  This is due to only having a 30 minute safe driving video/ lecture this time rather than the 3 hours for a new license. 

GOLDEN - From the K-POP Demon Hunters animated film must surely be some type of Master Course in making a catchy pop song.  

Just caught part of RICK BEATO’s video on what he wants to do on his channel next. Mostly not traveling and doing interviews any more.  More back to what he originally did on his channel, like film scoring and production, music education and song breakdowns, but NOT what makes this song great.  I haven’t watched most of his famous musician interviews, as that doesn’t particularly interest me. Survival Biase is a thing. His producer, recording engineer type things have been more interesting to me, but I also don’t care about mic-ing a drum kit or piano.  If what does helps me do my own thing, and inspires, that would be good.

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology  KYOTO JAPAN