Hey everyone, hope you're doing well! I was thinking about making a guitarwave cover of a taylor swift song, as I love her music and there is one song that really connects with my emotions right now. I checked out the Distrikod version for uploading a cover and saw that they charge you 12usd a year. If I go on living 50 Years that would be 600USD for one song which I think is a lot. I heard that there are other distributers that take a one time fee for it. But than you need to sign up to them and pay their yearly fee for joining them (which is more than 12 USD). But I think after like 3 covers it would be cheaper than doing them with distrokid. What would you guys do? Just don't do covers, accept the 600USD to Distrokid or go somewhere else for it? Curious to hear your takes! Simon

@Brian Hennessey recently made an interesting discovery when his track Lifted landed on the high-reach Spotify editorial playlist "Deep Focus" (see https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ5ahDUCaiH/). The rumors about so-called "ghost artists" and the term "Perfect Fit Content" (PFC) used internally by Spotify were already uncovered some time ago in Liz Pelly's book Mood Machine. What I've been missing since then is quantifiable evidence about how common these artists actually are in major playlists. To shed some light on this, I've spent the last few days building a tool with Claude Code to identify the "ghosts". I'm currently cross-checking the results with Brian and wanted to share them with you. Full methodology and results are in the HTML file below. 👇🏼 If you know of other suspicious playlists you'd like me to run through the tool, or if you have tips and ideas on how to improve the detection methodology, I'd love to hear your feedback. 🎸

https://open.spotify.com/album/7qoVHP40UUdYcL1AIs9GoH?si=-BcEjTUjRY6hCU09hg1OQQ Friends! The illusive instrumental project is now alive and kicking! It's been sitting in the back seat of my mind as something I've wanted to do for a while, and now with the love and support of @Sebastian Jautschus and the rest of the community "Toe Beans" is now out in the world. My first song "Big Stretch" should be available wherever you listen to music, but i included the spotify link above. I massively enjoyed the whole process, and I'm determined to make my process as resistance free going forward, understanding more about recording, mixing, etc. I already have a ton more ideas I want to put out, so now I justneed to be disciplined on staying focused 😜 Thank you all so much for the support. You really are a bunch of wonderful human beings ♥️ 🐈🎸

Needs practice. My first recording into Garage band on my early birthday gift to myself. Now I need to just learn to play better. This was at least 15 takes. You guys make it all look so easy!

Is anyone joining the Hangout tomorrow? 🎸 If so, I could show you how I use Claude for my music project — for example to build analytics dashboards or SmartLink pages. Happy to walk through it and answer questions.