Look mom: no algorithm!

Paul wrote a guest article for Mary Spender’s newsletter: The 21st Century Musician. Here’s a copy:

With our upcoming debut, I wanted to give our website a makeover in the style of the albums artwork. As I was contemplating on where to put the icons to our social media, I had to think about an old web comic by the Oatmeal: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

Which is as true today as it was in 2017. So why should I link (promote) any platform run by Meta, if it will effectively mean that I’ll have to pay to reach that same visitor in the future. In fact, why steer a visitor away from my website, if all the content I’d like to show is right there?

This train of thought let me to the open-source platform: Mastodon. Think of it as a Twitter alternative that it’s not run by a space traveling car salesmen. It uses the open-source protocol ActivityPub. This protocol allows other apps to interact with each other. Think of it, as if your YouTube post would automatically appear on Facebook and vice versa. These apps (servers) combined form a network called the Fediverse.

The biggest difference: no algorithm.

That’s right, you don’t have to pay for advertisement to make your content known among your audience. With #hashtags your posts will be shown to people who aren’t following you (yet), giving it quite a reach.

On march the first it was #bandcampfriday. Our account was 2 weeks fresh and had 17 followers when I wrote the post with our Bandcamp link. And what do you know… we made 2 sales, earning 6 bucks! That may not be a lot of money, but I really appreciate it and it confirms that for our band this is the way to go. In marketing terms, this is a very high conversion rate and unthinkable on any Meta owned platform. Of course it isn’t linear, I don’t expect to earn 12 bucks next month when we have 34 followers. In fact, I don’t expect to earn anything at all, I intend to share the link of another band that we like, keeping it social.

There’s an open-source alternative to each closed platform: Mastodon for Twitter, PeerTube for YouTube, PixelFed for Instagram, Lemmy for Reddit, and the list goes on.

Meta’s owned network Threads will also be connected in the near future. It’s quiet possible that their users will also see the content that’s being shared on Mastodon. However, that’s up to Meta, they make the rules on their server.

With Songtradr buying Bandcamp and laying of 49% of it’s staff, that’s not a very trustworthy platform to sell your music and merch on anymore. Mirlo might become a nice alternative for that. It’s still in progress and showing potential. They will integrate the ActivityPub protocol, connecting music to the ever growing Fediverse.

If you have any questions, I’m more then happy answer them. Let’s connect at https://musicworld.social/@moonshinebrigade , the Fediverse can use some more music!

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2023 wrapped

How will you be spending #newyearseve ?
#2023 is almost a wrap, we’re counting down the hours with #oliebollen and #fireworks ready 🙂

If there’s one thing we’ve learned during #covıd , it’s that we write more songs when we don’t have gigs to play. So this year we’ve focused on getting our album done. With result: we’ve got 12 songs recorded and mixed. We’ll keep you posted with the releaseshow/date when we’ve planned it.

One of the few gigs we did do, was also one of our highlights this year: Madnes festival
What a ball to be playing on the beach!

#spotifywrapped we’re in the top 5 of 3 people #awesome Let us know who you are and we’ll send you a copy of our #debutalbum