#melonadem

[melonadem]

the crimson caverns🪨🔥

[melonadem-personal]

IMU Café (Original SNES Chiptune)

Written for the monthly Button Masher Discord compo - where the theme was to write a coffee shop song for the SNES! Lots of cool entries were made, I hope the others post them on their social media!

Most of the samples are self-sampled sources, from various synths and VSTs I own - the radio chatter in the BG here comes from me sampling some Romanian radio, talking about football (soccer) scores - heavily manipulated to sound even more otherwordly!

[melonadem-personal]

wilted woods 🪵💀

[melonadem-personal]

Top of the world

240x160, 8 colors

Had fun making this for Battle of the Bits! The theme was treehouse.

You can watch a speedpaint of this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqATuW0uYqs

[melonadem-personal]

I thought this'd be an interesting walk through the world of music royalties and whatnot.

Recently I've had a payment from my distributor for music on Spotify, Apple Music, etc - this was across two years or so of streams (almost exactly, too - I remember setting this up ABOUT two years ago, give or take). It was a paltry sum of $5.37 (£4.18).

Now, it is worth noting I never really pushed these heavily - not that spamming links everywhere makes that much of a difference I found, but I've just put download links to those landing pages that directs you to where said song is on all platforms. On top of this, my discography on these platforms is extremely limited, compared to what I've got on my Bandcamp, YouTube and SoundCloud.

Still, it prompted me to do a bit of research onto where most of my streaming revenue comes from, and it's... interesting.

This is actual data that I've pulled and converted to one currency - it isn't 100% accurate, but I don't need that as I'm just looking for a quick comparison.

YT Ads - These are just your standard partner ads that I run on my music on YouTube. There's a threshold of, I think about £60 or £70 before it makes it to my bank account. On average, this earns me £10/mo.

Bandcamp - These are the most interesting ones - sometimes, people just buy your music unprompted if either your name is large enough to pop up on the front page (or however that algorithm works), or when you release some new music. Whatever money is also immediately available for payout (though PayPal usually takes a tiny amount of whatever they pay me out as tax, which is a paltry amount anyway so I don't really care). On average, this earns me about £7.60/mo.

SC Repost - This is who distributes my music to Spotify, Apple Music, etc. I pay £10/mo for this and SC Premier combined, so I really made a loss if we're just considering this domain on its own. On average, this is £0.17/mo.

SC Premier - This is just SoundCloud monetization, basically SC's version of YT Ad revenue. On a complete flipside to Repost, this basically pays for itself. On average, I earn £13.06 from this, but if you consider the fee I have to pay in order to get it, it's more like £3.06.

In total, If I create about 2 releases and 1 re-release every 2 years, I'd probably earn a total of £21.10/mo.

It's interesting to note, however, that the spikes are a direct correlation to me just putting the music out on platforms. Notably Bandcamp, as people have to pay to download for it usually - normally a small amount, but having an option to purchase the entire discography or having people want to add more on top of what they have to pay does do wonders. If I'm not putting music out actively, then ad revenue from YT or SoundCloud actually pays okay for the amount of effort I put into it (next to none). Ad stuff have less transientary moments, where it's just a spike with nothing afterwards, as I imagine people have to come back to the platform to listen to the music (whereas on BC, people download it and stream it offline)

No conclusion for this from my part, but I thought it was interesting to share. You can draw your own conclusion (and tag me about it or something) if you'd like!

Something to note about all this - I'm not exactly struggling for money, I have a full time job that I'm grateful I can work, and the way it is set up still gives me some time to work on music, which is about to become a lot more important (hopefully) next month as I'm planning to heavily push my music work again. However, in the meantime, I can definitely work on putting some music out on BandCamp and provide a far more complete discography on all platforms, which has been my goal anyway.

I hope that was an interesting read for you!

[melonadem-personal]

uh. why does tumblr want me to follow Big theCat? Does he know…?? ??????? DOES HE KNOW!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

[arockfromspace]

woah....

[melonadem-personal]

I wrote this song about 2 years ago, during the course of an hour. It is called "56", and it is written for the Roland MT-32 (Absolutely love this thing to pieces btw)