Next: Twitter Policies Codified. Previously: Presenting Adventure Rank Four.

Three More Tracks

459 words.

It’s quite a thrill to find out some random word or phrase or sound you recorded months ago just happens to fit perfectly into a piece of music.

Also, it’s a great distraction from the election, which is tomorrow. It feels like all of society here in the U.S. is on hold until we see how it turns out. So it’s a lot of waiting and hand-wringing for us here. Personally I’m tired of the speculating, and I’m ready to rip the band-aid off, to find out which version of Awful we actually end up with.

I think I’ve run out of creative juice for this silly experiment but here are three more tracks I made. For these, I was a little more judicious with the samples and tried to stick to a theme, instead of just shoving every file in the directory into the song.

Just for the record, I used REAPER and a huge pack of audio loops I got in a Humble Bundle a few months back to make all of these. I used a visualization tool called projectM and OBS to make the videos.

References: Detroit Become Human demo, Out of Place demo, and Into The Breach.
References a game called Layers of Fear 2.
References the Resident Evil 3 demo on the PS4.

P. S. I looked into the process of distributing music on YouTube, which, as far as I can tell, is the only way anyone ever listens to music anymore (outside of Spotify). It turns out, not surprisingly, it’s not a particularly favorable way to do it for small musicians. You have to become a “content partner” before you can tell YouTube that your music actually belongs to you. They make it sound really easy to do that, but in reality, it’s only easy if you have a lot of money and clout to throw around first, or you happen to have some other easy way to get a thousand subscribers quickly. It’s 2020 and I have yet to find an easy and/or effective way for small musicians to distribute music online.

P. P. S. I also learned that the cost to register a song copyright went up from $35 to $45 earlier this year. If I’m reading the rules right, to register a group of unpublished works in one application now costs $85, whereas before you could register a group with a single $35 application. And, apparently, and you can now only register ten works at a time, whereas the last time I did it (in 2017), you could register as many as you could upload with one application. You wouldn’t think that relying on musicians to bring down the national debt would be an effective strategy, but there we are.

Next: Twitter Policies Codified. Previously: Presenting Adventure Rank Four.

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Archived Comments

bhagpuss 2020-11-02T17:52:15Z

Say what? You have to pay to register copyright? Not where I live, you don’t.

From the gov.uk website:

“Copyright protects your work and stops others from using it without your permission.

You get copyright protection automatically - you don’t have to apply or pay a fee. There isn’t a register of copyright works in the UK.

You automatically get copyright protection when you create:

original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic work, including illustration and photography original non-literary written work, such as software, web content and databases sound and music recordings film and television recordings broadcasts the layout of published editions of written, dramatic and musical works

You can mark your work with the copyright symbol (©), your name and the year of creation. Whether you mark the work or not doesn’t affect the level of protection you have.”

Of course, proving you came up with it first is another issue altogether but it always used to be recommended that you simply post a copy to yourself by recorded delivery and keep it sealed. These days you could just upload it to some form of social media, presumably, like, for instance, this blog… which seems to be where we came in.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by copyright?

UltrViolet 2020-11-04T13:22:03Z Ah, yes I wasn’t clear. Legally yes you automatically own your works when you create them, but as you say proving it in a courtroom is another issue. One (supposedly) foolproof way to make sure you can prove it here is by “registering” a copyright with the Copyright office, which just means uploading a copy of the thing and paying a fee. Then they mail you an official-looking piece of paper that says you definitely own it.

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