Save the Cave

Doing a set at Gilly’s Cave of Music! Come see me and a bunch of other musicians do our things.

sockpuppet.band

[Tentative] Song Fight! Live! 2026

The 2026 annual live show for Song Fight! is tentatively scheduled to take place at Fast Fashion Brewing in the SODO district of Seattle. Come see fluffy in the significantly-less-plaid flesh! Further details will be posted as they become available.

sockpuppet.band

Full Moon Festival

I’ll be performing at Full Moon Festival. Further details TBD.

sockpuppet.band

Symphonic followup

Over on Reddit, someone asked about TooLost, and I mentioned that I used to use them and to avoid them like the plague and I said that I’ve been using Symphonic. They had some followup questions for me and I felt that my answer was detailed enough that I should also post it as a blog post here for future reference. This is sort of a followup to my previous review about them; nothing has really changed but I’ve had more encounters with their support side of things that I have a more detailed picture on what it’s like to work with them day-to-day. Note: I may earn a commission on affiliated product links in this article. Anyway, here is my comment, verbatim: > I’ve been with Symphonic since March of this year, and I currently have 19 releases managed by them (and one release each on Soundrop and CDBaby). > > I’ve had plenty of support tickets with Symphonic and they usually get back to me quickly, although often the response is clearly AI-written. When that’s been insufficient I’ve been able to escalate to an actual human, though, and the answer I get is honest and straightforward, like either “thanks for the feedback” or “that’s on the roadmap” or “that’s not something we want to support” or the like. > > My big complaint with Symphonic is that their metadata interface is very annoying to work with, and requires a lot of scrolling and clicking to set things like genres and individual credits. They don’t have any way of just setting the same credits for all songs on an album, and the genre selector is super annoying. I’ve given them some feedback on how it can be improved but I think it’ll be a while before any changes happen there. > > I’ve also had them reject releases based on genre or title-related things (for example, they would not accept my release’s original title of “Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To” because apparently “lo-fi” and “beats” are both blacklisted due to AI slop) but they’ve been straightforward in communicating about issues like that. > > They’re also a lot more strict about the cover art text requirements and, in particular, detecting text that isn’t in the release or artist name. > > I’m not thrilled with their reliance on AI for customer support, and reading between the lines a bit I suspect they also use AI for developing the site itself. They’ve also raised prices and tried to justify it based on providing AI marketing tools that nobody actually wants, but I think that’s just misplaced marketing efforts to try to justify them not operating at a loss. > > My main complaint is just that the UI/UX on the uploader and tagger _really_ sucks to use with my particular set of physical disabilities and I can’t imagine it being a good experience even for people who don’t have chronic pain issues, and I wish they’d provide some sort of API-level access so that I can just script my uploads with the metadata I already have on my own end. But I can also see why they wouldn’t want to do that, since it’d make it way too easy for people to automate AI slop uploads, which they are firmly against, at least for the music and art. > > They have a more detailed explanation of their stance regarding AI. I would say that as far as mainstream distributors go, Symphonic is the least-bad of a lot of bad choices. If I had my choices I’d not be on major streaming at all, but that’s where people want to listen to me. Hopefully Fairplayer and other distributed/indie streaming options take better hold. (I’m certainly trying to do my part to make it happen!) But anyway, in the meantime, if you do want distribution on the major DSPs, Symphonic has been pretty okay for me.

sockpuppet.band

Skyline

Skyline Festival!

sockpuppet.band

A Man Like Steve

A silly jungle remix of a classic Marcus Brigstocke bit

sockpuppet.band

Bandcamp alternatives

Just when I was starting to think that Songtradr’s acquisition of Bandcamp was turning out to not be the big problem everyone predicted, they’ve gone and shaken everything back up by laying off the remaining Bandcamp engineering team. This, uh, is not a good sign. So, anyway, while I’m not planning on dropping Bandcamp entirely just yet (and will still be uploading my new releases there for the foreseeable future), here’s some of the other places I sell my music. ### Mirlo Mirlo has been around for a while, but they made some pretty great strides when the original issues with Bandcamp had started to happen. They are, currently, my favorite of the Bandcamp alternatives, for the following reasons: * They actually care about artists and trying to make a better ecosystem for everyone * Their principles are based on socialist collectivism * Their long-term goal is to provide interoperability and a federated world so that they don’t _have_ to be a single point of failure, business-wise, and are being developed as open source * Their uploader is great (especially when paired with Bandcrash) * They give artists a choice of how much of a cut they take * They provide integrated merch sales (albeit with fairly clunky shipping setup), a fully-fledged artist blog (for those who need it), and monthly support options as well * They support pay-what-you-want with both an absolute minimum and a suggested default * They have integration with Fairplayer and also are looking towards other interop things for a larger world of independent streaming Things are still a bit rough with them in some places; for example, I don’t like how their frontend is currently a ReactJS app without any server-side rendering (which is bad for SEO and some forms of interop), and they still don’t currently have the ability to generate discount codes or do per-track artwork, but they’re constantly making progress, and ethically and politically they are about as far left as is possible in the space. I really want to see them do well. ### itch.io itch.io is an independent games, assets, and content store. I actually first learned about them as a place to sell my comics, although they’re primarily used for games and tools. They aren’t designed specifically to be a music store and leave a lot to be desired in the music sales department, but with Bandcrash it isn’t too difficult to manage your albums there. Like Mirlo, they allow you to set whatever platform cut you like, and they also have flexible bundles and discount codes, which puts them a bit above Mirlo. They also let you organize your catalog into categories/sections. They also give you an incredible amount of control over your page layout, with the ability to provide custom CSS on request. And they even provide the ability to sell merch, although it’s pretty clunky to set up. They also support pay-what-you-want with both absolute minimum and suggested default prices. However, there are a few reasons why they don’t earn my top choice; for example: * The company is very small and centralized, and has a very high bus factor * Their interoperability is quite minimal and lacks a robust API for doing things that would be very helpful to do * As they do not have a music focus, there are a lot of places where things could be better, especially with sales reporting and discovery Still, as an independent digital asset shop (with potential merch sales), you could certainly do worse. ### ko-fi Ko-Fi started out as a Patreon alternative with a tip jar and monthly support options, but they also have a commissions platform and sales for both digital and physical items. It’s pretty okay as a shopping cart, although handling physical and digital versions of things is a bit clunky as they have to be separate items (which means uploading the digital version twice, once for each version). Also, the only way to provide an audio preview on the shop itself is via a YouTube embed. To that end it works as a supplement for having your own website, but it’s not a great shopping experience. Also it offers absolutely no discoverability at all. They don’t offer a flexible sales cut option, but the standard cut they take is a mere 5%, and you can choose to pay a small monthly fee to waive that. They also do have discount codes, but they don’t have easily-managed discography bundles. Also, they support pay-what-you-want with absolute minimum prices, although there’s no way of doing a suggested price. Personally I focus on Ko-Fi for selling physical goods that aren’t music-related, but I do have all of my albums available there in digital form. ### Subvert This is a newcomer to the indie sales space. I’ve written a bit about them already. They have some interesting ideas, namely instead of taking a cut they ask for customers to pay a tip to the platform to keep it running (similar to Gofundme), but I personally feel like they are prioritizing style over substance, and the actual upload and metadata editing process is a bit onerous. There’s nothing about them that stands out in particular aside from the co-op business model and the customer-driven cut. Like many other sites, they support pay-what-you-want with an absolute minimum; they also let you offer discounts to other co-op members, which is nice. One notable missing feature is the ability to have hidden tracks on albums. There’s also no means of doing per-track artwork that I can find, which is something supported by both Bandcamp and Bandcrash. I’m not focusing too heavily on Subvert, although I will probably continue to upload new releases there for now. I’m not super confident in their future but hopefully they’ll surprise me. ### Some places I know about but haven’t used myself There’s some more places that are on my radar and which might have the right balance for someone else, even if they don’t suit my particular needs: jam.coop is still in its early days. It has a very minimal design (not necessarily a bad thing) and it’s under a co-op model. They’re also looking towards greater interop, so they’re worth keeping an eye on. bandwagon.fm is a Fediverse-first ActivityPub-based thing. I’ve put some of my music here but it hasn’t really met with how I want to manage my music. But it’s built with interop from the beginning and as such they also have ambitions towards being part of an open music ecosystem. Ampwall takes a somewhat different approach from most of the stores in that they actually charge musicians for hosting, and their rates seem a _little_ high to me, but they make up for it somewhat by also taking a lower cut than most of the other shops, and providing a nice browse experience. I don’t really know a lot about them but the Mirlo folks speak well of them. ### Places I am not interested in and why I used to use Gumroad, but its founder, Sahil Lavingia, has a long history of problematic behavior. Additionally, Gumroad is now primarily AI-coded and supported. I have also been receiving spam from various up-and-coming wannabe services that are being vibe-coded on platforms like zilla.so and so on. My thought on things like that is: if the promise is that you can start up a company based on just a notion that you don’t have to think about, why wouldn’t anyone else just do it themselves and cut out the middleman? ### A note about web presence Personally I think that any musician should have their own website that they run on their own terms, with whatever features make sense to them and with their own web domain and so on. I don’t believe in putting all your eggs in someone else’s basket. I run this site using Publ (and I will someday get around to releasing my site templates to make it easier for someone else to do so). A lot of folks use Faircamp which has a lot going for it. You can also build a site with any number of site generators like 11ty, Hugo, or any number of static site generators. Heck, you could also hand-code it the old-fashioned way. You could even go a step further and provide your own shopping cart and cheeckout flow via PayPal or Stripe or whatever. I don’t feel like dealing with that noise, which is why I just hand off my sales to other platforms. Even if you don’t want to build your own site, I highly recommend getting your own web domain and at least forwarding it to your favorite sales channel, or setting up a Linktree or Carrd to direct people to your preferred sites.

sockpuppet.band

Projekt: Community PJKT Fest 2026

Sockpuppet has been selected as one of the performances for Projekt: Community’s PJKT Fest 2026! Woo! Join group PJKT.3741 for access, and look for a hub world instance. Also don’t forget to check out their events schedule to see the many other amazing acts and activities that will be happening! And, for folks who can’t make it into VRChat, I’ll be streaming it over at the usual place. There’s also an unofficial stream on waterwolf.club being run by codysky!

sockpuppet.band

MeowMix @ Furality Ultra

Ready up players, 'cause this one is a real level-up for MeowMix! We were lucky enough to get to play our second Furality in a row this year, and once we heard that the theme for Ultra was videogames

soundcloud.com

Sockpuppet - elasticStage

Totally a real band with a bunch of people in it

elasticstage.com

Species Confusion

sockpuppet.band

sjX

sockpuppet.band

Sockpuppet - elasticStage

Totally a real band with a bunch of people in it

elasticstage.com

Sockpuppet

There are so many people in this band! You wouldn't believe how many if we told you. That's why we always have so many different styles and genres of music. Try to figure out who is who! Open for commissions - see https://ko-fi.com/fluffycritter/commissions for details.

sockpuppet.bandcamp.com

Kookie - Xenia (AMV)

YouTube video by Kookie

youtube.com

TA Winterlight - Cozy Academy

YouTube video by Trans Academy

youtube.com