What's Happening, Week of June 26, 2017

Amazingly, half of 2017 is almost gone, and I'm contemplating some new projects for the second half of the year. But first, let's talk about what's happening now.

My featured royalty-free stock music track this week is "Urban Podcast Intro 2 (Full)." You can find it at the link right here, though my main website, or pinned to my Twitter profile.

Rochelle Krause's web series "A Universe of Trouble" that features my stock music track "Mystery Suspense Theme" continues its run on Vimeo and YouTube. If you've not checked it out yet, I hope you will.

On my Spotify artist page, I'm featuring Olias of Sunhillow, the classic prog/New Age solo album by Jon Anderson. Also, please check out my playlist of ambient/chill influences that includes "Ocean Song," the opening track of Olias. I also put together a track-by-track discussion of why I chose each track in this blog post.

I have no new music in the pipeline at the moment, but have been blessed with a lot of sales over the past few days, and I'll be highlighting those tomorrow on my Twitter feed and elsewhere.

Now for some thoughts about the longer term.

I'm giving thought to reorganizing my collections on Pond5. My current collections are organized around styles (ambient, corporate, dramatic, etc.). I'm thinking of creating new collections based on mood: angry, sad, mysterious. Or maybe, positive, negative. Still thinking about that.

Another thing I'm pondering is possibly switching from CDBaby to DistroKid for future releases that aren't stock music. As I've mentioned in another post some time back, unless you're a well established artist it just doesn't make sense to release albums any more. EPs maybe, but not albums. As one article I saw put it quite succinctly: playlists are the new albums. So I think it makes more sense to release singles or EPs. With luck you can get one of those individual tracks on a playlist and have some success. To release a single through CDBaby costs $10 forever. To release unlimited singles and EPs through DistroKid costs $20 a year. So it seems like if I release two singles per year, it's a breakeven proposition. There may be things I end up having to do myself that CDBaby now does for me. I'm still researching. This all matters because . . .

I'd like to start releasing more. One of the things I want to do is put out some of my motivational stock music for individual consumption. It occurs to me that there are folks out there who might want to create their own personal self-motivational soundtracks, and some of my work would be perfect for that. Also, since the world doesn't revolve around albums any more, I don't feel I should necessarily wait until I have an album's worth of material to release. There are a couple of tracks in the more ambient chillout genre that are almost ready to go now, only a few tweaks needed.

So that's where I'm at for the moment. If you have some input, please comment. I'd love to hear your ideas and constructive criticism.