Indulge me a brief reflection on the music industry. I’m a composer. I don’t tour. I don’t like loud noises and if I see another person in the woods it feels like a crowd. My only revenue comes from direct sales and streams.
This revenue source has been strip-mined by rent-seekers. While the CEO of Spotify is worth nearly $5 billion, artists like me are making $0.002 a stream (roughly).
And, even when someone buys a song, there is a lag time of two to three months before I see a payment.
I’ve been wanting to find a way to give paid subscribers MP3 downloads of my songs through Substack. And it turns out, I’ve been doing it by accident this whole time. If you see the instructions below, you’ll see that all of these podcast episodes I’ve kludged into music sharing can be downloaded.
Now, I could truncate the songs, or add a little audio artifact to the end so you have to pay to get the pure song — but I don’t want to do that. I’m a listener and reader too, and I don’t want to pollute the experience for commercial reasons. I guess that’s why I’m getting paid $0.002 instead of $5 billion.
So, here’s the experiment.
I’m putting the music out. I’m going to give you as many options to listen to it as I can, including the free downloads. I’m going to ask you to upgrade to a paid subscription if you want to and you can. And I’m going to create a value add for paid subscribers. It might be liner notes at the end of a post. It might be WAV downloads, if I can figure it out. It might be exclusive remixes or deep-cuts.
At the very least, the paid subscription will give you access to all my writing. And it will keep the music flowing.
So, that’s my pitch. Below you’ll find the new boilerplate for these music releases, which includes instructions for downloading this and future songs, as well as another plea for money.
Thank you for listening 🙏
Thank you for reading 🙏
Like what you hear?
You can download this song as an MP3 for free on the Substack website. Please note, this only works on the website, not the app.
1) Click the three dots to the right of the fast forward button. A little option bubble will appear.
2) Click Download MP3. The download should start. Most MP3s aren’t bigger than 10mb.
3) The file will have a name like: “Andy%20Futuro%20-%20Everything.”
4) Click the file to play or add it to whatever music player you use. Despite the funky file name, the song should be properly tagged with my name, the album, genre, album art, and other information.
Like so:
Yep, I add all the information manually. These are artisanal handcrafted MP3s.
Buy or Stream
If you’d like to stream my songs or purchase them on the site of your choice, here are the links to find me:
If you’re a completionist, Bandcamp has the best bulk deal and a good deal for me too.
Just so you know…
The absolute best way to support me is to become a paid subscriber. Each of these songs takes dozens of hours to make (or more). A predictable income lets me dedicate more time to composing, and spend less time committing acts of banditry to put gruel in my bowl.
Plus, as a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to all my writing on Substack and some musical bonus content only available here.
I have a ton of music ready to come out. I need your help to make it happen.
Share this post