Saying Goodbye to My First Music Album

The Offseason Hobbyist's News:

It won't be easy for me to say this.

Today, I noticed that my old digital distributor, Stem Disintermedia, Inc. has taken down my first music album, Fun Elevator Music from Spotify, so I opted to request the take down to remove it from all platforms, since they will do that anyways before the end of the year.

I suppose it was an interesting, if maybe a fun roller coaster of a ride with them that had its ups and downs.

Artwork of my first album, Fun Elevator Music that was released on August 31st, 2018.

Commercially, my music album Fun Elevator Music was not a financial success, and my music albums may never really be.  I don't anticipate that it will reach that level in the future, but I do it anyways in the summer because I like making music, and from another standpoint, it has reached a lot of streams, or at least far more than I thought that there would be.

I've looked at some of the data, and while I won't share all of the details with you guys, I did notice that it received a whopping 19.7k streams.  Admittedly though, most of it was probably because it received exposure on Nina Stakz' short film, "Smoke Out" via Onyx Theory Arts (then credited under given name as Alan Lu), as I had a couple of songs on that soundtrack. Speaking of, it's a really good comedic short film that can be seen on YouTube.

So it's no surprise that the two best selling songs where the ones that were in the short film, as they were in it before I released my debut album.  According to the data, the top selling songs from my first album were my 2nd track, "Dreamt That It'd Go Something Like This," and last and 16th track, "Gut Instincts (The Extended Version),"with the rest of the songs trailing far behind in streams.  My 7th track, "Some Cuts Just Aren't Easy" did actually reasonably well on my Spotify streams compared to my other tracks.  The toughest aspect has been trying to build a sizable, appreciative audience from the ground up, and from a business standpoint, I understand the move on Stem's end of it.  On a personal level, this hasn't been easy on me, but I've decided what's best is to move on.

Anyways, they said it will take about 5-7 business days to take down the content of the first album, and since they've already begun the process, I decided to basically speed up that process.  Whether or not if I'll re-release it, I have not decided if I'll do that, as that remains to be seen in the future.  I've since have joined Routenote, as they will be my digital distributor for future albums, as I have released my 2nd album with them already, Hoopin' and Beatmakin.'

But for now, this will be a good bye to my first music album, Fun Elevator Music, which was a fun, but short-lived, one-year experience.  Gone, but hopefully not forgotten.

Also....Potential New Material Alert?

I will say this, the stuff I'm working on, I'm quite excited about, and may be thematically different than both Fun Elevator Music and Hoopin' and Beatmakin.'  So, if I can finish wrapping up my next summer project, I might be able to release a new album soon, so stay tuned for updates on that.  Anyways, I've been working on new music material, it's still not finished, but if I can wrap things up quickly, I might be able to release one just before the fall.  Otherwise, I might decide to wait until 2020 to release the next album.

Well, that's all for now, until next time....