July 2021 - Wrap Up

Last month's polls of the week brought up some highly interesting results. Especially the poll about how much everybody earns per minute of music brought up a massive spread of results between a majority who don't get any upfront money to someone earning more than USD 2.500 per minute. Another significant peak was at USD 500-750.

Another interesting poll result was my question about how many hours of creative work you guys usually do per day which clearly showed that between 3-5 hours per day is the butter zone for everybody. I always found it amusing how people on online forums claim to work 14 hour days for several weeks writing music.

Also interesting was that the people who are on here are spread out quite evenly over the different lines of work in our business.

In other news, it is just a little over one month before we finally will be recording our first Orchestra Discovery Session in Prague. It looks like this will also become a nice gathering of Patrons with most of the participants wanting to join the session in person which definitely will be a nice experience.

I got Synchron Brass by VSL a few days ago in spite of generally disliking the sound of almost all VSL products and while I still see some of these issues in the Synchron Brass (really not great sounding close mics, generally very unexpressive legato transitions) I feel that this library really adds some benefit to my template. I was posting a small snippet that I quickly whipped together with it over at our Discord channel and it feels that this library and its brightness really adds something to my template that I can't get out of the other libraries so I will actually keep a VSL library which is a first for me.

Speaking of Discord, in case you are not aware, this Patreon has a Discord channel where we chat and have nerdy discussions, so if you haven't already, don't hesitate to join and say hello. If you link your Patreon profile to your Discord profile, you will be take there automatically.

It seems like many colleagues spent Covid lockdowns with creating educational content. With so many composers releasing courses on writing music and production etc. these days, the competition for this Patreon is getting increasingly bigger which also reflects in the current growth (or rather lack thereof) of this Patreon. It is of course great to see that there is so much educational material available for up and coming composers these days which is something that I would have really wished for when I started out in this field and getting many different views on certain subjects can be extremely interesting. Also, the diversification in this educational field is great as these days you really can find specifically tailored course material on any sub genre of the business no matter where your preferences are.

So we'll see how this educational field develops in the future. I have the feeling that we will reach a point of over saturation with this as well as there is just a finite amount of composers who are willing to invest and learn in online platforms.

I still think and hope that this Patreon channel has a unique selling point in providing more advanced content and the many seasoned composers who are here seem to prove my point on this. The plan is to do a few promotional campaigns after the Orchestral Discovery Session to try to attract a few more people as I still would like to reach the point where I can finance regular full orchestral sessions with the revenue from this channel and invite patrons along where we can really experiment and try out things for the educational benefit of everybody on here. I really feel like reinvesting the money this Patreon generates into something that is fun for me (and maybe you too) is a more desirable approach than just seeing this as another stream of income, so let's see what happens after the first Session that we're having next month.

As always, thanks for your (continuous) support here!

Robin