Curious, why feature Spotify? Does that service somehow reflect FOSS mindset, along the lines of Ardour? Having glanced at Spotify, it seems their ‘free tier’ is intertwined with extensive tracking which is ‘sold’ to their advertisers. Maybe there is a better platform to highlight Ardour creators.
I didn’t start the playlist and when it was started Spotify wasn’t wonderful but it wasn’t the horror show it is now either. Generative AI to the level it is now was inconceivable and when this playlist was made Spotify and Apple were the most ubiquitous platforms and I would guess the OP wasn’t considering FOSS or not FOSS I think they were proud of Ardour and thought that works recorded with Ardour should be presented and available on the most visible platforms…
It’s easy to apply revisionist history to things… things change over time and people can only make decisions based on the information available to them at the time.
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Glen, man…I don’t know how to actually do it, using Spotify, Youtube, Facebook or even Tik-Tok :), but i realy think some of your songs deserve much larger audience. Just listening to “When You Got A Name” and it just hits, emotion-wise. While i was following you work related to AV Linux which i think it’s great, i’m begining to think that your music is actualy your true stronger side 
. Considering i’m not realy the biggest fan of blues, country or even Pink Floyd-ish rock etc (much more punk&grunge&electronic oriented guy) and i still think there are some excellent songs there, i think it speaks about the fact that your music could just relate to a realy wide range of people.
No pressure, just some food for thought .
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Thanks for those very kind words, it is very much appreciated! 
I don’t know what the answer is and I’m speaking for all aspiring writers, I think for all it’s just historically not the time for this right now so you just have to do this because you love it and find a way to make simply manifesting it the end game. On a different forum @Largos had a really eye-opening insight that put it in perspective for me. Previously in the music industry people wrote or performed a song and had no significant mechanism to share or promote it themselves except on a very local level and only if you had some of your own money to record and manufacture your own copies. Somebody else had to get it to the ears that mattered, an agent, a DJ, a promoter and those people had to believe in the chances of success enough to take it up a level without risking their credibility. If you were fortunate enough to get some radio airplay that generated requests for more, or a record deal that was essentially someone ‘asking’ for you services then you might have a slim chance. When Myspace and then Youtube came along people were overjoyed that there was no gatekeeper interfering with your ability to distribute and took it as complete emancipation from the gatekeepers of the record industry and on another front Napster, LimeWire and the peer to peer sharing thing were destroying the ‘Industrial Music Complex’ from a whole other angle and artists were like “Hurray, the King is Dead!!”
Now we have things like Spotify (and the dozens of others) that routinely screw artists harder than the worst of the worst record deals did previously, we have such a deluge of unsolicited and unappraised product that whether your work is excellent or terrible has become absolutely meaningless and lastly we have generative AI further compounding that and at the same time producing a made-to-order product in seconds that exceeds the skill of most burgeoning artists and it will just get more and more refined.
It turns out as imperfect as the record companies were they did serve a purpose and it was a crucial part of the process… the getting ‘asked’ part, and as it turns out that little detail was of critical importance… We have what we have now because people (and now machines) can produce, market, and distribute with no barriers is this limitless ocean of mediocrity where there is almost not even a ghost of a chance to distinguish yourself.
I don’t know why I write songs, they just happen and it’s been a real mental conundrum to me for years to comprehend why this systematically keeps occurring with no apparent purpose and I’ve been writing for more than 30 years with absolutely no traction yet songs continue to come to me… I’ve arrived at the conclusion my job is to manifest them into something and beyond that it’s just not my call. To wake up on a random Saturday morning and see a message like yours is especially meaningful, thank you again for your kind words.
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I disagree with that. The mediocrity comes because people don’t put the effort in. It’s cheap and easy to sign up to distrokid and get your music on streaming platforms. That’s why everyone’s doing it. People want to sign up to record labels because they do the promotion, get the audience and they also put the money up. In return, artists bend over and take whatever.
Now, you can connect to audiences directly. The costs have gone down dramatically, so you don’t need to enter into such insanely awful financial arrangements. You don’t need a fraction of the audience to break even as before. That’s effort to think about though, it’s easier to beg spotify for 0.003 a stream and they don’t even let you plug your own website.
Youtube is the only streaming platform that lets listeners communicate directly with artists, the others just suck the humanity out. The great things about the internet is people can own their own space and communicate with people from all round the world.
Ljuba (from I don’t know where) listened to your music as a result of your work on AV Linux. I am sure the compliment was more rewarding to you personally than 1000 streams.
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Hi @Largos
Yes, true. To continue with the metaphor what I was trying to imply was the sheer volume of ‘ocean’ and the extreme amount of dilution it has caused, you are right that the ‘quality’ of the water is not directly relevant although for the reasons you’ve laid out there is a lot of material that is mediocre. Getting lost in the vastness is a separate problem, the product out there certainly has a huge range of artistic ability.
To be clear the ‘record business’ was also extremely flawed especially when large corporations got involved and absorbed everything, I wasn’t pining for the bad old days, just pointing out how humankind can take something terrible and then make it horrible sometimes, getting what we want isn’t always getting what’s best…
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I’m very distant from Canada and USA, so i don’t know about the intricacies of those kind of music markets. Located in Bosnia (Banja Luka) whoose music market is closely connected to the markets of cities of former Yugoslavia, particulary city of Belgrade (serbian myself), Sarajevo (capitol of BiH) and Zagreb (capitol of Croatia). Our problems are vastly different. There’s no large unison market if you do music in our language as in USA or Canada, and you physically cannot book a large tour and travel the whole country, cause there’s no large country to begin with . If you do music in English, you loose the realnes in the eyes of domestic audience, the magic of real human connection, so it’s very rare that people listen to their homeland band who sing in English, and care about that. It’s often considered fake, for understandable reasons.
What i can say is that in person connection definitely with your audience works.
That being said, the last attempt to promote something i was involved in was in 2019, but even that was just continuos work from 2007, and even then it wasn’t me doing the promotion but other guys from the band…i was mostly busy doing musical arrangements, lyrics, engineering, songwriting etc. Basically, band existed like every real band from the past, played shows, had DIY releases, created and sold merch, won a couple of band contest prizes, had good critiques and we gradually began to have our own small audience. Then we disbanded, as it frequently happens with bands in general…
The interesting thing is, i can attest that people react best to the whole package - live shows+released songs+merch+videos+net content+media presence.
That being said - We never made any significant cash. Either the costs sum was 0, or some small tolerable minus.
So yea, i can agree that putting in the work and directly contact the audience is good, but, how to exactly do it the right way so that it’s sustainable and effective…well, I don’t have a clue, I could only guess or pretend .
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