on purpose
I'm slowing my music releases in 2025 while launching a biweekly newsletter on surviving as an independent creator online.
I’ve spent a lot of the last 3 weeks thinking about Ethel Cain’s latest release, Perverts. It’s an enthralling and intoxicating listen (subject matter notwithstanding). This album represents to me the power of music – that, outside the bounds of capitalism, music can abstractly express an idea or feeling so powerfully in a way that cannot be achieved by words themselves. This album has purpose – to express and explore perversion in a way that popular music cannot allow. Almost nobody with a record deal does this without huge risks, and almost no music released by major record labels has a purpose beyond brand loyalty and profit.
If you follow my yapping online, you’ll know that over the last 18 months or so, I’ve been releasing music as Kid Lightbulbs. Most of the music I’ve released has been pent up for years, sitting on hard drives due to impostor syndrome. This music has always felt purposeful to me, and only more so since I’ve finally released it – it’s collectively a time capsule chronicling my development as a human being and partner, which I personally feel even more deeply than my listener because of the time it’s taken for these 3 albums I’ve released to be “done”. I see this project as purposeful – as a reflection and heightening of the emotional rollercoaster that is being part of an incredibly intelligent and deeply aware but somehow still “lost” generation.
While I don’t have a large audience by some measures, I have developed a small but highly engaged one, gaining me a nice little bit of income from my music, some great collaborations and ideas for future projects, and most importantly the self confidence to keep going. A lot of this came from my trying a bunch of different stuff – knowing my music was not mainstream, that my likely fans wouldn’t be passive listeners, and that the algorithms that drive our dominant platforms would likely not work in my favor.
Between this work and my ongoing stint working on Buffer, I’ve developed a passion and curiosity for figuring out online independence – how we can avoid being dependent on the platforms that have come to dominate the internet and, increasingly, our public discourse. This curiosity has grown and become more important to me as the political tides have shifted in the US, seeped into “big tech” platforms that our entire world depends on to communicate, and more clearly and obviously represent a hostility toward marginalized and creative people in service of an increasingly violent, repressive and isolationist cultural landscape.
I strongly believe that each of these changes are the wrong direction for our society globally. I also believe that art and artistic expression is vital to surviving this current reality, and that expression by independent creative individuals is arguably the most vital because it exists outside the bounds of corporate, capitalist structures that otherwise govern our lives. The more we can do to actually support those expressing themselves the better.
I’m not talking about a Like on a marginalized creator’s Instagram post – but real, meaningful & sustainable support. Proper evangelization of important work and ideas, regardless of the format. Creating beauty from whatever this current situation is, and distributing it across the widest-reaching platforms we have access to. Ensuring that artists can continue to artistically express and explore.
The purpose of this newsletter is (has always been?) to share ideas, findings and stories around surviving sustainably & ethically as an independent creative person online.
The biggest surprise I’ve found is how difficult it is to find genuinely useful, unbiased organized information around the various topics in this vein. I’ve met hundreds of indie artists across various disciplines, with a wide range of fan bases, who feel stuck. Jaded. At mercy of the whims of big platforms and algorithms. The tools they’ve relied on becoming less reliable and more complicated over time. So this is my attempt to remedy that.
I will aim to send a biweekly proper newsletter, likely on Sundays, covering at least 1 topic, experiment or finding related to my independent work as a musician and creator.
I’ll mostly focus on the non-creation aspects – maintaining an audience, getting paid, administrating my work, etc. – but I’m sure bits of my creative process will seep in
I also aim to, over time, cover other art forms like photography (my wife does this!), prose writing, video, games, and so forth. I also suspect my explorations as a musician will apply to other types of creators.
I would like to eventually have this newsletter be weekly – one idea I have is to have a longer newsletter biweekly, with a more Q&A-, profile-, or interview-style installment on alternating weeks. I need to figure this out still.
The first upcoming issue will focus on my strategy for using Bandcamp, as well as a few other music platforms I’ve discovered, in 2025. Expect that in ~1 week. Some of my older writing on these topics is also available to read via the archives, and I’ll likely reference this from time to time.
If you like what you read and would like to support my ideas & experiments, please consider buying me a coffee or a recurring donation. I’d really appreciate it.