SOCIAL MEDIA STINKS

Hear me out. I would love to tell you that I enjoy playing the social media game, but I really don’t. It might be good for keeping in touch with Aunt Mavis, but it’s rarely good for telling people about music you’ve made. Even if it’s people who are already into it.

It would cost money - literally hundreds of pounds - for me to make sure that everyone who follows me online saw just one message that I’ve recorded a new song or EP. And that’s before you get to the idea of having to tweak and optimise my social media presence to maximise engagement, poring over click-through ratios and testing different styles of post. No thanks, I’m bad enough at playing guitar, before I start concentrating anything else.

I’m no massively famous artist, I just make music from time to time that a bunch of people enjoy. If you’re one of those people (you’re the best), then there are two things you can do that I would appreciate, and you might think are a good idea.

If you want to know when I release new music, enter your details at the bottom of this page. Fake names are 100% allowed. If you like, you can also set it so that I let you know when we release a new episode of the ITSBUP podcast (it’s pretty good). No bollocks, just an email when I make something new.

The other thing relates to how you listen to my music. You’ll always be able to listen to the majority of it on streaming services, and that’s fine. If I had my way, everyone would listen to it by downloading it directly from Bandcamp. You can download it to keep from there, for free if you want.

If you’re one of the super-stellar people out there who feel like you should trade money for enjoying music, then it’s worth mentioning you’d have to stream one of my songs for around twelve hours on repeat for me to see the £1 you might choose to pay to download it.

So that’s it. If you don’t want to hear from me directly when I make new music, no worries, live your life. If you do, fill in the form just below and I’ll email you whenever I release something. It might even be good!

- Ben