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| This is à propos of nothing in the text below – I just find it interesting |
This evening, I bought a new web hosting service. My previous one had "renewed" after three years at $30/year to $100/year. For what?! A 7MB HTML5 website that gets about 10 hits that aren't from me per year. I won't name the previous host, but it's located in Austin, Texas, and has failed to keep up with other hosts that offer lower rates plus SSL for free. The nameservers should be transferring as I type this.
I have had misgivings toward Bandcamp since it raised its rate to 15% and started the tiers-of-service inducement crap, and then stuff like the degrading "whole discography" discount option. My albums are $5 a download: one a week, and you won't feel it. It's because of that factor that I've stopped sending free-download links of albums out to people I know. If they really wanna hear my latest-and-not-so-greatest, they can do so for the price of a pint of craft beer or an iced chai that will be gone within 20 minutes and forgotten the next day. People are likelier to really listen and pay attention to something for which they've paid – none of that "I made it through about halfway, but what I heard sounded pretty cool" nonsense.
However, now that PayPal, the payment method linked to Bandcamp, has raised its sales fee, I am compelled to raise the prices on Bandcamp to an amount less discretely "discretionary." To complicate matters, every so often Bandcamp virtue-signals by donating its 15% from sales to some trending "social-justice" cause with which I don't necessarily agree, and I resent that music's thusly being hijacked for the purpose of promoting prefab political tropes.
To resolve this complication, I might just post entire compilations and host sampler medleys on Bandcamp, and offer full albums or custom (in evasion of the trendy archaic term "bespoke") orders for downloads by contacting me directly and my sending the interested party an expiring download link of the order for which he/she has paid me directly. If I can't just grow up and have a WordPress site with a shopping cart, this would seem the way to go. At the rate that Bandcamp is going, they'll start pulling stunts like deleting some of my material for being a "threat to public safety" or taxing my sales for my ostensible "whiteness."
It's a really big lie to think that using such online resources is "doing it yourself." It's putting oneself at the mercy of dipshit rich kids who only care about looking and sounding as much like one another as possible. They implement the "platforms" and make the policies by which we must abide. They have no sympathy for what we do nor what we're about. Go to their parties, and they don't want to talk to you. Only dumb effeminate twits could propagate so many online companies whose names end in "-ly" and "-ify." But such is the nature of Replicants. They're less than human; they thrive by imitation – but when they manage to innovate, they aggrandize it as being "disruptive." Me, on the other hand – the only reason I'd like to meet Elon Musk is to ask him how I could get one o' them flamethrowers. I could disrupt some shit with that thing.