For years I was adamant that I didn’t like ambient, I think because I’d only been exposed to very boring drone stuff. Then I discovered Solar Fields / Carbon Based Lifeforms and it changed my musical world.

I’m quite horrible at self-promo so sadly it’s just gathering digital dust, but after 20+ years of writing dance music for myself and others, I decided to get heavily into writing ambient / chill. Made a load of trippy animation videos and setup a youtube… if you love Solar Fields, without meaning to sound bigheaded I think you’d enjoy them.

Ambient / Chill by Ain

I love anything by Solar Fields for tasks requiring concentrating, it’s especially good for reading scifi.

Whenever he releases a new album though I have to listen to it a few times, before I can have it on in the background… It’s very beautiful and intricate.

Yep has to have no lyrics or I get pulled into the song!

“Don’t say things about someone behind their back, if you wouldn’t be prepared to say it to their face”

I learned not to say things about people behind their back, that you’d not be prepared to say to their face, aged 14.

Cost me a black eye & split lip, also some pride. Valuable lesson though that stuck with me to this day over 2 decades later.

Knoble, sorry for calling you Knobless.

Yeah I’m the same. I’ve got DDG set as my default search, if the results aren’t useful then I go to google as backup.

Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type ‘thbnks’?

Spotify iirc pays $0.003 per stream, so for 80m streams he’s got $24,000.

If he’s got less than that then he should be directing ire at his label or publisher.

We are as unready for this shit as we were for social media.

Genuinely concerned this will tip the balance enough for trump to win.

Bregg

I see what you did there ;)

I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.

I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.

I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?

Ah come on you know what I meant.

People say this all the time about Spotify, but it’s actually a viable outlet for revenue if you’re on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.

Obv that doesn’t apply for freeform… but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it’s not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.

Got a sample preview of your favorite release?

I don’t think it would be wise to dox myself here after I’ve made an unpopular comment!

I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.

But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.

Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.

When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music

Exactly. I had a 12 track album up for £9, or single tracks for 99p, don’t think that’s unreasonable!

Pirating from massive companies who exploit their workers and customers is different from pirating small indie artists, surely?

Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.

Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.

As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.

Shreks all day, baby. Why the heck would I want to be a stinky vegetable that makes people cry, when I could instead be a stinky ogre who makes people cry?!

Get oot 'o ma swamp.