“The Summer EP” Now Out to Streaming and Download

Posted on October 5, 2022    Posted by John Scalzi      7 Comments

As readers of the site well know, over the summer I wrote and recorded a number of musical tracks and posted them here and elsewhere; it was fun for me and hopefully enjoyable for other folks too, but it also meant that the individual pieces were scattered and somewhat disorganized. So I went ahead and collected the pieces up into a single collection for streaming and download and called it The Summer EP. It’s already up on YouTube/YouTube Music, and TIDAL, and will show up elsewhere in the next couple of days; arrival of indie stuff on music services is more or less at their pleasure.

Actually, that’s not quite fair of me. I have the ability to schedule a release, and in fact did schedule the release of this EP, under the slightly different name of How I Spent My Summer Vacation, last Friday, and sure enough, on midnight of September 30, HISMSV smoothly populated into all the music services. Whereupon I discovered that one of the tracks was not the actual track I intended, but a fragmentary test track of a plug-in I had just gotten. This meant I had to spend several days recalling that EP from every single service it was available on, and then reposting it under a new title so as not to create any confusion. Fortunately (heh), no one was expecting the release, so no one aside from me was inconvenienced in any manner whatsoever.

Likewise, as I pulled the initial EP release, I also pulled the previous “single” versions of the EP tracks, both to clear up visual clutter on my streaming service artist pages, and to help with tracking streaming and downloads, so they would not be split across two iterations of the same track. I initially hesitated to pull the single tracks because I was worried I would mess up someone’s playlists or something, but then I noticed that the most popular of the tracks had slightly over 100 streams on Spotify, and then I was all, yeah, it’s actually probably okay to do that.

In addition to being streamable, the EP will be/is purchasable at Amazon, iTunes and elsewhere; I set the price at $2.99, and the individual tracks at 69 cents (yes, nice, I know), which in both cases are the lowest amount I could set the prices via DistroKid, the service that distributes my stuff. I don’t have it up via Bandcamp, partly because I need to see if there are any conflicts with DistroKid with me putting it up there. If there aren’t, I’ll post it there soon. Buy it if you like! I will take your money! BUT–

— honestly, if you have any interest in this music at all I am perfectly fine with you just streaming this EP. I can, how to put this, be patient with the remuneration of this aspect of my creative life in a way that perhaps other people putting out music cannot. If you take the $2.99 that you might take to purchase this EP and instead apply it to the purchase of another independently-released artist, you know what, I would be good with that. I mostly just think it’s neat I can make music and then put it out into the world and have people find it.

I do like the music I made, too. This particular EP is the sound of me figuring out my DAW and a bunch of my other musical equipment and software, and I think that shows in the production. On the other hand, unlike Music For Headphones, my previous release which was entirely loop-based, every sound on Summer is programmed and/or played by me, and that’s a significant development, at least for me. It’s all me, baby. And, uh, a whole bunch of software I’m still learning to get sounds out of. Summer represents my “state of the art,” as it were. It’ll be fun to see where it goes from here.

In any event: The Summer EP, by me. Out and about in the world. In fact, here are all the tracks, in EP sequence. Enjoy.

— JS