I updated a few recordings on my Mixcloud

So I've been aware for some time that a few of the live recordings that I've posted to my Mixcloud are greyed out. I looked into it one time, and found that it's only the US listeners who aren't able to access those recordings. Something to do with royalties or licenses or copyrights or something like that. Something about mixes not having more than three songs from the same artist in the recording. Which is a bit absurd, because I've posted about 100 other recordings which have many more than three songs from the same band in them, yet those aren't blocked in any countries.

The only thing I tried to do is to delete those recording's tracklists, and label the entire recording as one big single track. That didn't do the trick, and those few recordings were still greyed out. It sucked, but it didn't bother me too much, as I expected somebody from some other part of the world would find some way to download the audio and post it somewhere else for download or as a torrent or whatever.

But now I see that for one reason or another, at one time or another, I signed up an account with a Mixcloud clone site called hearthis.at. It was super simple to transfer all of my Mixcloud recordings over to HearThis; it was just a single button in fact. But those recordings that were greyed out didn't transfer over.

So I dug out my archive hard drive and found the original aiff mixdowns and tried to upload them directly to HearThis, and apparently HearThis has no qualms whatsoever about making them available to everybody, worldwide. So now all you American listeners can rejoice, as you can now access these recordings-

Enduser live at Berghain, Berlin, 14 May 2010

Venetian Snares live at El Corazon, Seattle, 7 June 2008

Enduser live at Scoundrel's at Liquid Den, Las Vegas, 5 May 2007

YouTube vs Mixcloud

Audio/music basics-

People don't care about music any more. Although they will watch/listen to just about any thing on YouTube, regardless of video or audio quality.

Case in point- my live recordings of Daedelus from March 2012 and March 2013.

The 2012 (audio only) recording has been available as an audio stream on my Mixcloud page for about three months. It's high quality, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered audio, comparable to any proper live album you've heard over the years. Daedelus himself has promoted the recording on his FB page, and as of today it has just over 50 listens.

The 2013 recording is of the same high quality audio, and even though the songs performed are different than the 2012 show, generally speaking it's the same show. The big difference is that this newer recording is accompanied by the video of the performance as well as the audio. It's up on YouTube, and Daedelus promoted it the exact same way he promoted the Mixcloud recording a year ago, and the video has accumulated over 400 views in 24 hours.

Of course, I don't expect that pace to continue, but it pretty much crystalizes my suggestion that people will check out videos on YouTube much more readily than they'll listen to audio/music without some video to accompany it.

Lesson learned- if you're me and record pretty much nothing but live albums, I wouldn't even bother do all the work to produce the recording without video, because next to nobody will take the time to listen to it. From now on, I'm not going to make any live recordings without video.

Perhaps one day I'll do an experiment where I'll put up the audio on Mixcloud and the video on YouTube of the same show and see what the response is.

Lesson for bands- I see a whole lotta Soundcloud tracks with thousands and thousands of plays, and that's impressive. But it makes me wonder what their play count would be if that same track was a video on YouTube. I make some original music as well, and (if I want anybody to hear it) I don't think I'm gonna consider putting it up anywhere other than YouTube with some video of something, even just a montage of random shots of nothing in particular.

(Unless I actually try to make any money from selling the mp3s, in which case I'll head to Bandcamp, but I think we all know that selling mp3s these days is a laughable proposition.)

If you're interested, here are the Daedelus recordings-

Daedelus live in Los Angeles, 29 March 2012 by Humorlessproductions on Mixcloud