I am a big believer in the power of communication. I honestly believe that a huge percentage of the problems in the world have come about mainly due to a lack of communication. I even have a quote from one of my songs about it that I think about often. "Rain On Me" is a song I wrote many years ago, and it's one of those that came through in an afternoon. I had been thinking about the idea that sometimes I feel like my heart feels pain on behalf of the entire world. But the line about truth is very appropriate now:

It don't matter what you do
It don't matter what you eat
If you don't know the truth
You won't be free

What a crazy time to be alive. So little signal, and so much noise. So in the interest of open communication, I wanted to take a minute to break down both how we (CHILLFILTR®) got here, and how we will move forward.

The Beginning

Basically, in 2018, at the end of a very long contract that I had - supporting a business intelligence platform that I had built from scratch using Ruby on Rails - I was in a bit of a meltdown, in terms of my personal relationships, my feelings of self-worth: I guess for lack of a better term, you might have called it a mild midlife crisis. So that's when I decided to build CHILLFILTR® as a brand and as a blogging platform, both to offer to musicians the type of support that I never had, as well as serving as a vehicle for me to reacquaint myself with modern music. I've been a songwriter for almost 40 years now, but in my early 40s I had sort of stepped back from everything and I wasn't even listening to much music at the time. Looking back, I was in full emotional atrophy. I'm so glad I was able to reconnect with myself enough to change the direction my mind had been going in.

At that time, I wasn't working full-time, and I was splitting my part-time dad duties with getting this new idea off the ground. Fully 50% of my days were dedicated to listening to new music and writing about it, and I owe most of my music contacts to that two-year period until Covid hit in 2020. Covid really changed everything for us, for a lot of reasons I won't get into, but that's basically what triggered the move to New York. And once that happened, I was back into a full-time career as a web technologist. The reason that matters is, I feel like to this day, most of my contacts still think I am as accessible as I was in those early years.

Email is Broken

This has been a really slow burn, but somehow over the last five years, the email situation for me personally, has gone from messy and chaotic and annoying, to completely untenable. I get so much spam to so many different accounts, that it's just not possible for me to keep on top of it all. At this point I actually resent the people that email me the most. Honestly, if you have my email and you email me more than once a week,  I'm probably starting to not like you. Just because some jackass decided to put my email in a book next to thousands of other emails, and make the completely unsubstantiated claim that cold emailing me is a good idea, doesn't mean you should do it. There is a better way.

How You Should Submit a Song To Me

We have a very simple submission process now. You pay two dollars per song as a listening fee, and that's it. I want to keep this as simple as possible for everyone involved. I do have plans over the next few months to roll out some subscriptions, just to make it a little easier for anyone who wants to be consistently submitting their music for consideration, but in general from now on submissions will begin with a selection from the services section of the CHILLFILTR® web store. I will not be responding to emails under really any circumstances. I just don't have the time to be constantly monitoring my inboxes.

Why We Need a Copy of the Track

If you want us to consider your music, it is non-negotiable that we are given a hardcopy of the track. The reason for this is that ever since we rolled out our Internet radio channel so many years ago, we have positioned CHILLFILTR® as really a funnel towards the Internet radio channel. So if we don't have the track, we can't spin it on the radio. And that's why you're here, right?

I know that people are still concerned about piracy. Some publicists and labels offset the danger a little bit by only sharing slightly lower resolution versions of the file. So if you are concerned about sharing a top quality MP3 with us, for fear of it spreading around the Internet, then consider creating a lower resolution file to discourage piracy. Live 365 has a suggested cap on the stream resolution just for ease of access, so technically 128 kbps is high enough to make the radio stream happy, but also low enough to not really be useful to the BitTorrent crowd. Although, to be fair, I am most happy with tracks encoded at 256 and above. but if you have a great track, and are only willing to send it to us at 128, that can work. Thanks for coming to my TEDTalk.

The End Game

So what are we really trying to even do here right? Aside from the implications of what's being called the dead Internet theory, which I'll probably get into sometime soon because I do think it's appropriate for a lot of reasons, ideally I could continue to elevate this platform to the point where it creates enough income for me to not have to work full-time in any other capacity. And once that happens, truly, it will be a beautiful thing, because I'll be even more available than I ever was even in the earliest years. That means weekly, or possibly even daily, write-ups for member artists, more posts to social, which will allow us to grow our reach, and a lot more activity on the newsletter side. Of course we're not even sort of close to that point, because we're still not even covering our expenses. But I am confident that I can finally get that to change. Now that we are hosted on Webflow, it allows us to be a lot more agile in terms of rolling out new features. But the endgame is clear: free me up to be a full-time writer, administrator, and community leader for the CHILLFILTR® platform. How can you help make that happen?

• Share our posts with your friends (we've added links to each post using sharethis).
• Buy our merch.
• Buy a membership when they are rolled out.
• Submit your music for consideration.