I'M. BACK.!
Hey all, apologies for pulling a vanishing act for the past half-year. Just needed some time to recharge from burnout, creative-blocks, and being picky about my mixing and mastering quality (again). I built a new PC in the meantime (a much needed upgrade from my old 15 year-old build!), and have rekindled my inner gamer over here a little bit.
For advancements and commentary (aka word-vomit) about my changes in my signal-chains and whatnot, see my vid description of my recent cover of "Lilacs and Lolita": https://youtu.be/ReOb5KubE0U
The rest of this post will be more of an update of other changes and things to come. So first, yes, the TNT MIDI Pack Marathon will continue SOON™... I'm just needing to get back into the swing of things over here, as well as trying out and testing my new mixing and mastering signal-chains.
Also, a big change and announcement is that I'm going to be dropping music distribution to streaming platforms. No worries though, as this won't affect anything on Youtube or anywhere else where I am able to self-publish, without any hassle from intermediaries and/or middle-men. That said, I need to blow off steam and rant for a bit. So feel free to skim through the next bits here while I vent and have my old (young) man yells at the cloud (pun intended?) moment...
/START RANT:
So, its always been a MASSIVE pain in the ass when it came to trying to get a cover distributed. I have to hope that a track is able to clear the licensing process. So, sometimes things will go fine, other times, I'll have stuff like the YS cover that I did, where it'll wind up failing the license process. I'd have to worry about straying too far from the original, otherwise it might wind up classifying as needing a "derivative" license... which is pretty damn silly itself, because aren't all covers "derivatives" to begin with?! Anyhow, dumb legal semantic nonsense aside... So there's worry about whether a track falls into that gray area of not qualifying for a mechanical license. Then the other headache is whether a song already has an official release somewhere in the US. So, for some songs, that's simple. For old video game soundtracks... yeah, good luck with that.
Now, this is just my experience with my distributor, Soundrop. The original track has to have a US release since it makes it easier to get a mechanical license. Also, said mechanical license for the cover will only cover distribution to audiences in the USA. So that alone winds up cutting out a big chunk of the listener-base here, as there are many of you that live outside of the US.
On the topic of Soundrop, they've also recently raised their fee from a nice and cheap $0.99, which was nice because if stuff didn't work, well, I'd only be out a dollar. Now though, its $5 a track now. Which, granted is still cheaper than some other distributors where with hidden fees wind up charging people like $13-$20 ANNUALLY PER COVER (looking at you DistroKid...).
Which, just to dunk on DistroKid for a moment (it irks me every time I see anyone doing an ad-read for them), I think its absolutely disgusting and disingenuous how they market themselves as being so great because they don't take a percentage of your royalties... which sure, that sounds nice and all without context... but then you factor in the hidden annual fees and even the annual subscription itself. Which for most musicians, you're probably not going to make enough in a year from streaming to cover their $20 annual subscription, let alone the added costs if you wanna put up covers as well.
For reference, my cover of "Something To Remind You" had apparently done REALLY well on Facebook. Some people had used it and it garnered like 250,000 streams over the course of 3 years (or has it been 4 now since I've put stuff up on streaming platforms?). Speaking of which, bonus points for Facebook forgetting to pay/report the royalties to Soundrop and myself until just this past February! So, 250k streams must be worth at least a beer or something, right? Wrong! 250k streams of music royalties from Facebook/Instagram Reels in particular will net you a *hefty* $2.02! And that's from countries like the US where marketers pay the most for ads. So yeah, seeing that was pretty disconcerting and didn't help the whole burnout-mood several months ago.
The state of the music industry has also been nosediving at an almost comical rate (but honestly, par for the course in the crazy times we live in, I suppose). Looking at Spotify, last year they implemented a thing where they basically don't pay you the royalties generated from your streams, UNLESS the individual track gets 1,000 streams in the year (they can also decide to just straight up deny you royalties, at their own discretion). Then, sometime around the start of this year, Universal Music Group and Spotify decided to team up in this triple-threat match to dish out elbow-drops on indie musicians by reducing the amount of royalties that Spotify has to pay out to musicians. A dumb loophole where Spotify was able to lower (the already low) royalty rates through some bundle-deal that had something to do with audio books. Through this whole thing, UMG also got to work out a deal to get a bit of preferential treatment on Spotify as well. There was a whole lawsuit regarding all this earlier in the year, but nothing came of it (as far as I can remember).
To add on to the whole UMG and Spotify thing, it bugs me so bad that Soundrop raised their fee since they're owned by Downtown Music, which is owned by UMG. So its like, damn UMG, you already f*cked us all over with your stunt earlier this year with Spotify, and NOW you guys are having your subsidiaries try and squeeze MORE juice out of the indie musicians that you JUST screwed over? Its maddening!
Anyhow, as for the other platforms, they aren't as bad... but they don't really pay all that much better either. For reference, in the 3 or 4 years since I've had my stuff up on all the various streaming platforms, it wasn't until the end of January or start of February of this year that I finally got $18 from my distributor (Soundrop has a minimum payout threshold of $20, I forget if I can actually set it lower, but its kind of an irrelevant point).
Then of course there's all the nonsense with streaming platforms stealing music to train for AI generation. There was one here several months ago where a pretty big distributor or streaming platform had tricked their users into consenting to have their stuff used for training AI music stuff. It was something along the lines of "Here, if you accept this, we'll make sure that your music won't be used in unauthorized AI music training!" and then the 'gotcha' moment was "Well, you accepted the terms, so NOW its authorized! So we technically didn't lie to you all!". So, if the music market wasn't already over-saturated enough, its about to go even further beyond!
/END RANT!
So with all this going on, I've decided that its just really not worth it to gamble $5 for a cover that may or may not clear the licensing process, to then have it be restricted to only audiences in the US. Same with shelling out $50 for an original album release instead of the ~$10 that it used to be. Unless something that I do goes viral and gets stupid popular, I'm just not going to bother with the whole mess of distribution to streaming platforms. I'll just stick with releasing to Bandcamp, Youtube, and Odysee.
Anyways, I think I've gotten all of that out of my system. Hope you all enjoyed this TED Talk. Time for me to get back to work over here! Hope you all look forward to more songs here soon! And thank you all so much for your patience and continued support! I really appreciate it. ~DAR
watch video on watch page
11 - 4
Hey all, just wanted to give a little update on a few things. First is that a couple of the last 4 covers managed to clear distribution, those being:
From Ashes To New - Crazy | theofficialdavester2296.wordpress.com/2025/01/10/f…
And,
Art Of Dying - Get Thru This | theofficialdavester2296.wordpress.com/2025/01/12/a…
Unfortunately, the YS cover, and the Freelancer cover both got boned during the licensing process, so that kind of sucks, but oh well...
That aside, good news is that I'm ready to get back to pumping out covers for the TNT MIDI Pack marathon very soon! Before I get back to Doom, all that's left to do is to post the new original track that I've mentioned a couple of times in the vid-descriptions of the last few uploads.
Anyways hope you all look forward to the new track, as well as the return of TNT! ~DAR
32 - 4
So, the TNT MIDI Pack, huh? Looks like we're in for another long ride (though hopefully nowhere as long as the Plutonia MIDI Pack took!).
Below you can find the link to the poll results. To summarize though, the MIDI soundtrack for SIGIL and the TNT MIDI Pack were pretty much neck and neck both tied at 22 votes. That was until there had been one vote that helped turn the tides the day before the poll closed! With these two soundtracks dominating the poll, I think its safe to say that Jimmy's SIGIL soundtrack is definitely locked in for the marathon spot after this one is complete. ~DAR
Also for some reason, Google Forms doesn't have the ability to simply share the results page with the nice bar graphs and stuff. So I've attached a screenshot of the Main Poll page chart, and the link is to the spreadsheet that logged the responses and voting times. Also redacted usernames to keep the votes anonymous!
MARATHON POLL RESULTS (SPREADSHEET): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q5SLBTDfQLpr3_QLl-…
33 - 9
Hey all, I'm back with a bit of a surprise: my first featured interview is out! digitalbarry.com/exclusive-behind-the-music-of-90s…
Shoutout and big thanks goes out to Samad and Simon for reaching out to me for this interview on DigitalBarry!
Also in the interview, for those of you eagerly anticipating and wondering which Doom soundtracks came out on top in the marathon poll, I do mention two that were tied in votes at the time of writing.
Anyhow, hope you all enjoy the article! ~DAR
22 - 4
"NEW GENESIS" returns, with a hell of a bang if I do say so myself: https://youtu.be/S6sbQ-sSpdE
Also really glad that I was able to salvage the original album art. I seem to have misplaced the project files for all my album art stuff pre-RED Planet. So thankfully, I've once again managed to work a bit of magic to get the current "DAR" logo on here. Quite happy to see the logo here in place of the old one!
Can't wait to remake the rest of this album here in the near future! ~DAR
17 - 6
Its TIME, for the first time ever on the channel, we are putting the next Doom Marathon to a vote! Poll's live, and voting will last until October 1st, and the big reveal will be on October 8th. Link to the Google Form is over here: forms.gle/x2UQu16LmTCw6q787
20 - 4
It always keeps slipping my mind to post about this over here, but this channel is archived/backed-up over on to my Odysee channel, which can be found here: odysee.com/@Davester2296:c?r=5rCDW1Qcqag4j2ht6aM9S…
The Odysee channel has been around since the start of 2022 (if I remember correctly). I just recently remembered that I should plug it a bit more often (especially after the whole Youtube ad fiasco as of late).
I've also gotten my playlists recreated over there as well (just made the Plutonia playlist, so it might take a moment to actually show up in the "Playlist" section).
So if the ads or user-experience over here on Youtube ever gets absolutely unbearable, you know where to go! ~DAR
20 - 5
Hey all, "Dirge for the Planet" is now live up on all the big streaming places! (just the vocal version, cause I can't exactly distribute the instrumental. At least as far as I know, due to technicalities and licensing.) ~DAR
SPOTIFY: open.spotify.com/track/3kA5WaqCtkTneEyLZYh396?si=b…
APPLE MUSIC: music.apple.com/us/album/dirge-for-the-planet-cove…
DEEZER: deezer.page.link/9yKytuusnU1jw8d67
TIDAL: tidal.com/browse/album/338159411
AMAZON MUSIC: www.amazon.com/music/player/albums/B0CRFBGX74
MIDI VERSION DOWNLOAD: mega.nz/file/0PUHTDqJ#R1Ygofof1vV7tO5kcoqPE4knaIaj…
20 - 0
SOON! The grand return of my epic 12-minute Doom short-film is going to premiere this Tuesday! Mark your calendars, bookmark the link, get hyped and drop in for the live premiere on Tuesday, August 8th, or check up on it later if you can't make it for the premiere. In any case, for old and new fans alike here on the channel, this is definitely a video you don't want to miss! ~DAR watch video on watch page
5 - 12
SOON! The grand return of my epic 12-minute Doom short-film is going to premiere this Tuesday! Mark your calendars, bookmark the link, get hyped and drop in for the live premiere on Tuesday, August 8th, or check up on it later if you can't make it for the premiere. In any case, for old and new fans alike here on the channel, this is definitely a video you don't want to miss! ~DAR watch video on watch page
3 - 0
Hey all, DAR here, this channel has now become my main channel. All originals and covers will be uploaded here from here onward!
See how to support and tip me at: theofficialdavester2296.wordpress.com/