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I’ve been slowly working on fully tagging all of my releases. At this point it’s at about 90% coverage, with nearly everything having genre tags and most things also having instrument and mood tags.

Novembeat

Some years I produce a lot of music for Novembeat. Some years, not so much. Usually it ends up with an album at the end.

So far I’ve made 10 tracks (all posted on the YouTube playlist) which is on the low end but it’s been fun to play with things all the same. I might do more this month although I haven’t been super motivated. The last few tracks I worked on I at least streamed live on YouTube which was a lot of fun.

Some of the tracks I’ve made so far are ones that I definitely want to revisit as full tracks and don’t want to do a half-assed release at the end of the month, and the other tracks are ones that are fun as tooling around but nothing I am really super inspired to release on an album, so I think this year I’m just going to limit it to the playlist (same as I did last year) and treat it as a fun exercise instead of it being A Thing. Especially since I no longer really feel the pressure to feed the streaming algorithms.

New music

I’m still working on the soundtrack for a game, and it’s coming¹ along nicely. Our goal is to release the game in 2026, although there’s nothing more firm than that which I can disclose publicly.

I’m also continuing to work on music for some other clients, and collecting more ideas/gumption for whittling down my album production backlog.

Performances

I’m excited for two performances, Skyline Aurora Fest this Friday and the Trans Furs Support System anniversary show next Saturday. I’ve upgraded my performance setup even further to make these the best shows I can. Some highlights:

• I’m now using backing tracks combined with live instruments, and many of the backing tracks are specific to my live performances with new arrangements
• I have a pretty complete pedalboard that gives me much more control over my live sound, including a proper reverb setup
• I’ve switched to using some wireless IEMs that give me a lot more freedom within my VR playspace and cuts down on the fragility of my monitoring setup

I’m also trying to get in on the beta for the EOZ immersive gloves in order to get proper hand tracking while I perform, although it’ll still be some time before that happens. Right now it’s definitely the most promising option that’s coming to market in the foreseeable future.

YouTube channel update

Switching to self-administered releases on my channel has been the best decision I’ve made, for unexpected reasons.

Normally, when releasing music to YouTube, you have to go through a distributor, i.e. the same companies that put music on services like Spotify and Apple Music. Technically, YouTube Music releases are separate from regular YouTube, and the “official artist channel” function is just a way of getting YouTube Music releases to appear on the “releases” tab of the official artist website.

The plus side to this method is that all music listened through YouTube Music gets administered like any other music stream, and YouTube pays out around half a penny per play, which isn’t nothing. And it’s also nice that these releases show up on the release tab, and have all of the necessary metadata for music business things. But it has several downsides as well:

• There’s basically no control over what appears on the video description
• There’s no control over what the video content actually is (generally it’s just a static image of the cover art)
• There’s no way to directly provide synchronized lyrics/subtitles, auto-captioned or otherwise, unless it’s a feature provided by your distributor (and setting that up at the distributor side is a pain in the butt)
• The artist has absolutely no control over how anything is organized
• YouTube Music plays do nothing to help with discovery within the greater YouTube algorithm and doesn’t affect the artist’s YouTube watch stats
• Listeners aren’t actually directed to the musician’s channel (at least, not reliably) and there’s no real integration between YouTube Music and general YouTube following
• The artist doesn’t benefit from any of YouTube’s copyright tools beyond what their distributor makes available (usually at great added expense and with exceptionally poor granularity)

And none of these are issues for self-administered videos! So far I’ve had the following benefits already:

• People have discovered my music through the regular YouTube recommendation feed
• I’ve hit a new watch time milestone which is good for the ol' dopamine factory
• I’m having a lot of fun figuring out various forms of audio visualizer on the videos
• I am able to do my own copyright administration based on my own preferences

It isn’t perfect, of course. Since I’m going through regular YouTube plays, I don’t automatically get paid for listens (not that I was making that much to begin with), although hopefully I’ll hit a monetization threshold at some point. Also, if someone does get recommended a song through the feed, they’ll just get it on its own with no link into its respective playlist (although I suppose I could at least put a link in the description). Also there’s no way for me to organize playlists into groups; I think that feature does become available to larger creators, but I haven’t hit whatever threshold is necessary for that just yet.

I could do more whole-album videos to preserve the album-oriented listening experience, and I’ll probably get around to doing that when I’m done clearing this reupload backlog.

But anyway

I am a busy bee and I still have to manage my energy and chronic pain (and being up this late to blog about it certainly isn’t helping). But things are feeling pretty okay right now.