Hey! It’s been another 2-ish months since I sent a newsletter out. Well, I’m here to tell you that summertime is almost busier than any other time of year when you have a kid: they’re out of school, they want to be outside, you want to be outside, and that means less time writing. I have been quite busy with a number of things!

But also I’ve had creative spark manifest in a few different ways. Not music so much, but in a few other ways, and that’s what this is going to be about!

Introducing social sindy: an easy way to get your posting schedule syndicated to your calendar or an RSS feed

It’s built on the Buffer API – just sign in with your Buffer account, create a feed of either type, choose which social channels and types of posts you want in the feed, and plug in the resulting feed wherever you want to use it.

I was inspired to build this by my recent explorations into RSS and other open formats. I have already found it useful to quickly spot-check on my calendar what posts I have scheduled for the upcoming week, and I even set up my RSS news reader with a feed so I can casually scroll through posts I’ve made in a nice, minimal reading interface.

Try it out at socialsindy.com and let me know if you have any feedback!

Ambitions for Unstream

(read this on the web)

I had a moment of clarity about Unstream over the last few days, which was triggered by my desire to build some other product that might be viable as a revenue-generating side business. The challenge with that other idea is that, while I do think it could generate side income, getting it off the ground requires a lot of work – even in 2026: finding initial users, facilitating a process akin to sales development (barf), standing up acquisition and retention marketing functions that don’t look like slop but aren’t as close to my personal interests, continuing to support a product that I might lose interest in over time. This would require a lot of time and (more importantly) focus that I simply cannot afford to give right now, if I want to be good to my family and myself (cough cough make some music for once).

Unstream, on the other hand, is a pure passion project that I’ve been able to both build and talk about quite naturally as part of what I think about as a builder and creative person. Its reach is low, but there are some obvious things I can do to expand its reach. Plus, I have a few ideas to make it a much more ambitious thing, and even something music fans might be willing to financially support as a light-but-useful utility, all with the original goal in mind of reinvigorating direct support for the arts. I could see myself continuing to build on this thing over time.

And so I am going to. This is what I want to build over the next few months:

A proper database and service for cross-platform music releases

One tool I sorely miss was song.link aka Odesli, which was unfortunately bought by Linktree. It’s not fully shut down, but they closed their API and seem to have stopped pulling in most unsigned artists into their results. (Oddly, it seems like it’s now better for searching for podcast links? Ugh.)

Odesli was (is?) an invaluable source for cross-platform links to virtually any music on any streaming service. I loved it because it allowed artists to share all the places their music was available, not just Spotify, which at the time (and likely still is) most people’s defaults. I personally found that by giving users a song.link page, they were more inclined to listen to my music on their streaming service of choice, which allowed me to respect the preferences of potential fans.

But I don’t see the classic Odesli song.link/album.link pages around social media much at all. Most musicians can still share cross-platform pages anytime they release music, but many don’t - they just default to Spotify or whatever page is provided by their streaming music distributor. Not all music distributors offer this kind of thing, those that do tend to have shittily-designed pages, and they by default exclude any direct-support or marketplace platforms because they only deal with the streaming services.

What if Unstream had a way to automatically generate a cross platform release page for any artist, with preference given to the platforms best for directly supporting that artist? What if you could subscribe to a feed or calendar for your favorite artists so you could see when they will release or have released music?

Built-in patronage

I mean no shade to Patreon, Ko-fi, or any of the other places where you can buy from or financially support an artist. But it’s a whole step outside of Unstream, and usually you have to sign up for one of those services just to give an artist a few bucks. I feel it’s natural to just build patronage right into Unstream, so a fan doesn’t need to do that if they don’t want to.

I envision the artist still being aware of their patron’s email address, so they can add them to a mailing list or something.

What’s more exciting here, to me, is that this opens up doors for some more compelling patronage options, like group patronage - supporting several artists in a single payment. I explored this once and put it aside, but it still feels quite viable. This could reduce fees paid to payment processors and more money in the hands of artists.

Artist community building supports

This is a 2-part problem to me: Artists could leverage Unstream to better engage with their best supporters (ie. the ones who actually buy their stuff), and artists could form community with each other (similar values, that sort of thing). The angle to patronage I mentioned above could be an inroads for artists cooperating more and competing less, without having to rely on big tech platforms to do so. I also realize there are other solutions out there for this (fediverse, matrix chat, etc.) but I would want to build something that makes artist community and cooperation more approachable for more artists.

Unstream for other creative forms

I’m not sure what this looks like yet, and it might not be worth pursuing outside music. But it’s on my mind.

Making Unstream sustainable for the long term

I feel Unstream is getting closer to a level of polish and features where I’d feel comfortable marketing it more widely and offering some kind of premium version. I originally had this, but I removed it because it felt disingenuous to charge for an app I’d quickly thrown together in a couple of weekends that ultimately didn’t do much.

I feel like I’m ready to figure out the right secret sauce of features + pricing that would make sense to offer.