Bandcamp Links > Spotify Playlists
Why I'm slowing down and sharing amazing beats one at a time.
In late August of 2018 I started making a 10-beat Spotify playlist every day and titled the project “The Micro-Chop Daily X.” Each day I shared a new playlist on Twitter and tagged all of the producers who were featured.
My thinking was that the combined social media powers of all involved parties would signal boost music by lots of talented artists while building a Twitter community. This was assuming most/all of the producers decided to retweet the playlist.
The Micro-Chop Daily X didn’t quite work the way I envisioned it for a number of reasons. Though people were enthusiastic about the playlists at first, the whole thing seemed to become static background noise on Twitter and I was glad when I could finally call it quits.
Playlists are a complicated and murky business. They’re an ecosystem that artists are dependent on to a certain extent, for better or worse. Playlist have certainly helped some producers level up in amazing ways and put their music in front of listeners all over the world. But far too often I’ve seen a large number of very worthy producers left out in the rain, unable to get playlist placement and/or produce the necessary streams to really make a difference for exposure or their wallets.
I also get the sense that it’s frustrating for producers that they have to be so dependent on such an arbitrary and corrupt system. People they’ve never met or even communicated with decide of their songs “deserve” to be featured on a playlist with a bunch of other artists they often have no real connection to. And of course there’s favoritism/pay for play/and all kind of nefarious stuff that frustrates the hell out of producers just trying to make tracks and catch someone’s ear.
I stopped making playlists to share with readers a while ago. Spotify’s tonedeff behavior and continued efforts to screw over artists make it extremely unlikely that I’ll do anything like the daily playlist experiment again.
I have, however, been continuously amazed by Bandcamp’s support of artists through their Bandcamp Friday event that they’ve hosted every single month since they pandemic started. These days I want to use my audience and my platform to steer more people towards Bandcamp releases. So I’ve started sharing single songs from albums on Bandcamp with the song title, album title, release date, artist name, and album art.
Sharing single songs from Bandcamp won’t make anyone an overnight success. But in a very fast paced world where it sometimes feel like to we don’t have time to slow down and fully appreciate anything, it does give me the opportunity to share the music I love with my Twitter community - one amazing beat at a time. That’s all I can really ask for.
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