Today, we received our first anonymous donation and it feels like the start of a new era. Those of you who have been listening to CHILLFILTR® Radio since we kicked it off in 2020, may have noticed that once an hour, I have a short plug for the donation page at giv.me. I'm glad to see that it's starting to resonate with our listeners. I always knew that it would take a while, perhaps even years, to have the kind of organic growth that I was looking for. To be honest, five years is sort of a long time to wait. But I'm happy to report that we are currently averaging between 50 and 60 listeners per day, with some spikes going up to 120, and a minimum of ~35.

I've mentioned this before, but whenever I look at monthly breakdowns like this, I am reminded of the early days of CHILLFILTR® Radio and how at one point I was just happy for that number to not be zero. Now, maybe it's finally time to even out the books, and start generating at least enough revenue to cover our costs. To whomever made that first donation, I want to say thank you. Every journey starts with a first step.

In terms of the writing, what's interesting to think about now is that I completely designed the micro blog format in order to maximize my presence on Apple News. In the end, I have created something that I think is even more powerful than the ‘walled garden’ Apple News has become, which is really just trying to add a commission to other subscriptions. I don't like that model, and I don't like how difficult Apple makes it to publish quality content. My whole idea was to keep the best content available for free inside the app itself, which you would think is something that they wanted. Instead, they eventually shadow-banned me, for reasons that as far as I can tell, amount to the fact that I was making other outlets look bad. By providing my quality content, at no cost, and without ads, with the song itself embedded in the post so that you could listen without needing a subscription to Apple Music, I guess I was breaking some secret rule of profit maximization. But let's be clear: Apple is not your friend. They just want your money. Welcome to modern capitalism.

At the time, that felt sort of surprising. In light of how bad the presentation of publicly-available media has become in recent years, I am no longer surprised. It was never about getting the best content to the most people, and I was naïve to ever think that might be true. But that same innocence is what has led us here, and after publishing close to 1 million words across 3000 individual blog posts, I have stumbled onto what might very well be my legacy, which is the curation and preservation of indie music in a time when streaming, AI, and commercial consolidation have completely transformed the landscape of public music consumption. With the next generation of listeners becoming disconnected from the identity of the artists that they purport to find engaging, the idea of having a source of record for the kind of ephemeral music projects that are so common in an organic landscape has become something I am very passionate about. I truly do not see anyone else on the Internet doing what I do for the reasons that I do it.

This project, namely the intersection of blogging, Internet radio, and community radio that I have built CHILLFILTR® & The Weekly Catch into, is now and will continue to be a sort of Wayback Machine for indie pop songs that will never be subject to the kind of financial wrecking balls that so often appear out of nowhere. Your music is safe here. It is my dearest hope that before I die, I can sign over the entirety of this project to an organization that can be trusted to leave it alone. Be that a group like Fresh Grass Foundation, or even an entity like the Internet Computer, I don’t know. But I should have at least a few more decades to figure that out, and for now, solving the challenge of mild profitability is enough to keep me busy. But make no mistake: this catalog continues to grow, and there are songs here that cannot be found anywhere else, mostly for one simple reason. I accept songs from anyone, with a very low-cost barrier to entry, and approval is based strictly on my subjective opinion. No one can buy their way into coverage, meaning, if I don't like it, it doesn't get in. BUT, the flipside is also true: even if you have zero followers, even if this is your first production, and possibly also your last, if I like the song, it will live here forever. That's powerful stuff.

And when I started the blog in 2018, similarly, I wasn't really looking for profit. What I was trying to do was create an alternative to the horrible experience I had with a very sketchy channel called Obscure Sound. it was very clear at the time that SubmitHub was a really great idea, and a very solid implementation, but at the same time there were still a lot of members who got very close to the edge in terms of illegal behavior. Admittedly, music marketing is sort of a dark art, and this was before Spotify and the other streaming services became the pay to play environment that they are now, but even so, broken promises should never be normalized, and clear and open communication should never be ‘too much to ask.’ When Mike Mineo offered his ‘paid promotion services,’ my inexperience interpreted that as a blessing. When his communication with me dropped off a cliff on precisely the day it was too late to contest the credit card charge, I knew I had been suckered. From that day forward, it was game on. The challenge was to create a viable alternative to that kind of bait-and-switch business model. And here we are, 7 years later.

Now I also have a show on community radio here in Ashland, Oregon, and also in Medford. Every Wednesday night at 9 PM you can hear me talk about some of my favorite songs, and most of them will be songs you probably haven't heard before. This is the problem I'm trying to solve, basically: some songs in this world are played far too often. Some should be played a lot more.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your support of independent media. Music is still truth, and this song is still about you.

Be well.

photo: my garage/office at night

cover photo: a dragonfly perched on my car's antenna