Well after a thirty-year journey my track, 'Alien Queen' will be my last!
Due to the craziness of the Covid-19 lockdown, and to save my sanity over these last 18 months, I’ve done everything I wanted to do on the music side.
All my songs remastered, and accompanying music videos reworked and polished up.
I look at the music business now and it’s a totally different creature to how it was when I encountered the seedier parts in 1990.
As I’ve realised, these days, if you’re over 30, your career is all but over. You can’t make any kind of real income with music sales anymore; I can attest to that. It’s all about touring, merchandise and Social Media. Artists these days have to literally flood social media with every aspect of their life, including love interests, material goods, political opinions and just about everything else thrown in: it’s a relentless grind and treadmill - your whole persona laid bare to gain momentums of credibility with all the crap that entails.
I tried on numerous occasions pitching tracks to Spotify to get on their chosen playlists, but failed.
So, I thank my lucky stars I’m out of it. I mean C’mon! Who’d want to see a guy like me over 50 prancing about on stage? I did Music Videos for YouTube not for reward but art. Plus, the occasional live performance from home, which is ironic - because since Covid-19 obliterated our world - big-scale musicians have done the same.
On the topic of touring, I know older artists who were absolutely massive in their day still perform - and I give them credit, however, some of them are forced to tour just to keep a roof over their head. Royalties from their music sales are shrinking year-on-year, streaming mostly responsible. I mean if you get 100.000 streams you’re lucky to make about £300, and incidentally, that's exasperated - as many artists got ripped off by their record companies.
Most musicians don’t even own their original master-tapes or their music-videos. Thankfully for me I never signed a record deal, even though I was offered lousy ones: so I still own the rights to my music and videos.
And so with that last emotive sentence I’ll bring these notes to an end.
‘Alien Queen’ is now available from all digital platforms.