I see what you did there ;)

You might as well have run into an alcoholics anonymous meeting shouting about wanting help setting up a bar.

Wish you success but I doubt you’ll find much help on lemmy for a reddit community, many of us here have a low opinion of reddit in general.

I guess, I just don’t see many people getting something for free then deciding to go buy it out of the goodness of their heart… maybe I’m too pessimistic.

I try not to pirate music production software because I make some small money from my music, and I’ve personally seen companies go bust and get snapped up by Apple because everyone (me included) justified pirating their small plugins as “they’re making lots of money anyway”. But I justify pirating shit like Adobe to myself I hate paying a subscription to use software. I dunno maybe more people have this mindset than I realise and are happy to pay after ‘trying before buying’.

I’m interested to hear responses from anyone who genuinely buys the music they enjoy after pirating it. Why would they not just buy it in the first place?

Ah come on you know what I meant.

People say this all the time about Spotify, but it’s actually a viable outlet for revenue if you’re on a decent label who understands how to leverage playlists.

Obv that doesn’t apply for freeform… but for styles like trance, techno, DnB etc it’s not unheard of for a track to get 500k streams across a variety of playlists, which equates to $1500.

Got a sample preview of your favorite release?

I don’t think it would be wise to dox myself here after I’ve made an unpopular comment!

I agree. I think people have taken my comment as a defence of the geoblocking, was just offering an example of why someone like a small indie musician may choose to do that. I do find it frustrating when I have to VPN to a different country to watch a video.

But the reason I geoblock one country isn’t to be an arsehole, it’s because Russia has no recourse for indie musicians like myself who have their music stolen. They have no law preventing music theft which is why it’s rampant in that one territory (not saying it doesn’t ever happen elsewhere). Pretty much the entire rest of the world has some sort of avenue where I can issue something like a dmca.

Hard to say really. I’m fairly sure if it was available online for free, less people would have bought it.

When you’re talking only £2000 or so of sales for a small indie release, piracy makes a huge hit to sales. My more popular stuff like trance, the sales drop off a cliff the moment it’s leaked. There was a huge problem with people on promo lists leaking pre-released tracks to warez sites, not sure if the main labels (eg ones like Armada, Anjuna etc) ever got to the bottom of it, but it really hurt the sales of people who aren’t exactly making bank from their music

Exactly. I had a 12 track album up for £9, or single tracks for 99p, don’t think that’s unreasonable!

Pirating from massive companies who exploit their workers and customers is different from pirating small indie artists, surely?

Whenever I release music myself, I actively block it in Russia, because they relentlessly steal my trance / freeform releases and upload them in warez sites.

Of course geoblocking can be circumvented by a determined pirate but it helps to not be on their radar in first place as a lesser known artist.

As an example, once I released a freeform album. Freeform is a very niche, small scene. It was on Russian forums within a couple of days. Fortunately one of my fans notified me, I had a Russian friend contact the site on my behalf to explain that I’m a poor struggling artist, and they’re literally taking money out of my pocket; to my surprise they agreed to take the links down.

I had two towels at once for a while, as I’m quite hairy. One towel didn’t feel quite enough to get ne fully dry.

4 towels seems a bit much if I’m honest!

This is probably a key factor.

Dark Reader. Not invulnerable to sudden blinding at night, I’d say one site in 200 seems to sneak through. But imo it beats all other dark mode addons I tried and certainly the default dark mode.

Some great tips there, very much appreciated. I’m fairly ignorant re keto so will do some reading up on it, if you have any resources to hand I’d be interested to read them

hahahaha. Yeah it’s a bit too on the nose.

Am in the final stages of buying a house (hopefully), landlord evicted me over repairs so I’m temporarily living with my dad… he’s a bit of a feeder, I did make the point to him last night that if he puts food on a plate in front of me I’m going to eat it (brought up to eat everything I was given, ‘starving kids in Africa’ etc) and he agreed he’d stop offering me food all the time. I’ll defo make an effort to eat more protein & less carbs, thanks for the headsup!

I am in a constant struggle atm to lose weight. Am 6’ tall, but 94kg so definitely technically overweight (and it’s fat, not muscle, do they make bras for men? Cause I’ve got hairy tits right now).

You’re right, last time I cut down on carbs combined with drinking green tea the weight melted off (though I was also doing a lot of pushups daily which also helped). cries in love of pasta

I’d say that’s significant. Your liver is probably kinda creaking under the combined strain.

Have a serious think about your drinking, as if you are actually alcoholic / addicted then it could be harmful to go cold turkey instead of reducing gradually. I know from experience it’s really hard to say no especially if your social life revolves around pubs / bars & clubs. But it’s certainly not impossible, you’ve got this.

Interesting, thanks. My mum has it (FLD), but she rarely drinks, just quite overweight unfortunately (cue the mum jokes lol). My dad has a condition I call ‘microliver’, he went through years and years of blood tests then liver biopses before a surgeon opened him up for something more than a core sample… and in his words “laughed at how small the liver was”. He gets drunk exceptionally quickly!

So genetically I’m double-fucked. Starting to get the same ‘weird’ gamma GT levels in my blood tests and being told I’m an alcoholic (as my dad did for 2 decades in the air force before they discovered what’s up), I do drink but prob about once a fortnight. I’m much taller than him though so maybe I just have a miniliver instead of a microliver :)

It’s fairly normal to suddenly find hangovers are a big problem as we get older… it feels like one day you’re able to go out, knock back a hideous amount of booze, then bounce back the next day ready to do it all over again… and all of a sudden those two pints of beer create the hangover from hell.

Not sure about tolerance though. What country are you in… is it easy / cost effective to get a liver test done? It might be down to lots of perfectly natural factors… if you lost weight; if you have a different diet (some foods ‘soak up’ alcohol better than others and cause it to be absorbed more gradually, if you’re drinking on a salad instead of say, pasta you’ll see a difference); you could be drinnking different beers.

Also, if you’ve had significant weight gain, this causes your liver to get fatty, which puts a strain on it; I’m not a medical professional but would think that could have an effect too.