This week I’m looking for ways to share some of my music with people. This is not as simple a process as you might imagine. I’m not able to play local gigs anymore, because I can’t physically load the P.A. speakers into the car. That’s what happens when you get old.

Various websites — YouTube, for instance, and soundcloud — let listeners stream your music. Unfortunately, the listening experience is cluttered up with ads. Fuck that. I don’t listen to radio for the same reason. Fuck capitalism itself, in fact. Not gonna support it any further than I absolutely have to.

So here’s a track I grabbed from my hard drive more or less at random, just to check out how it plays back in the blog. This was done in VCV Rack, I don’t remember how or when or why.

Please check me out on this: Do you see ads when you visit my blog? I don’t see them, because I’m logged in as the owner of the blog, but maybe wordpress is sneaking them in behind my back.

As long as I’m fooling around, here’s another track. This started out as a medley of “White Rabbit” and “Red, Red Wine,” but at some point I decided to change the melodies and chord progressions so as to avoid copyright problems. I kept the groove, which was my own creation to begin with. It’s now an entirely original piece, and probably better than what I started with.

An issue with any type of online streaming music is that most people are wandering around on the internet using their phones. Your phone does not produce high-quality audio through the little tiny mono speaker. Earbuds are an improvement, I’m sure, but how many people are going to whip out the earbuds and plug them in so they can listen to a track on a blog? Probably not many. On a commercial streaming site earbuds or headphones are more likely. I used to listen to Pandora through headphones while at the gym. In order to avoid ads, I paid for the subscription — and while I could (and did) define a pool of related tracks, such as jazz piano, I had no choice about what individual tracks would be played. I haven’t investigated Spotify, but I would expect it’s much the same, if not worse.

Reaching listeners with music you created yourself is not easy, but right now I’m opting to go the do-it-yourself route. I may put a few things up on youtube too, and I do have a bandcamp page. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing.