Donate: Pacific Island Sessions

There used to be a big thing called the corporate music industry. The big three labels still exist, but they're much smaller than they once were, and they've mostly been supplanted by Big Tech.

There also used to be a thing called the independent music industry. There were independent record labels that made money for themselves and their artists by first investing in high-quality recordings, and then selling lots of albums. When Spotify and the formerly much more major labels eventually made peace with each other, this led directly to the collapse of the independent music industry. Overnight, after 2013, there was no more selling albums in any form for most of us, for the most part.

With the sudden loss of about half of the income of most independent touring artists, all kinds of crowdfunding platforms became popular, as an alternative means to support the ongoing existence of touring artists who can afford to make the occasional record. Like many other artists today, I mainly survive from crowdfunded patronage, through a Community-Supported Arts program I set up on my website, and through Patreon.

However, I have personally found that although crowdfunded patronage has been absolutely tremendous in allowing me to continue to pay the rent and feed my family, it has never reached the level of support that would be needed for me to be able to come up with the thousands of extra dollars that are generally needed in order to get a bunch of musicians together to put time into an album project.

Through the height of the Covid-19 lockdown era, you can thank the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program for helping to fund several records I put out in 2020 and 2021. But that's over, and we're back to begging from the Crowd.

Here's a playlist of some of the songs that are likely to be recorded in January.

davidrovics · Candidates for Pacific Island Sessions

Here's a little video introducing folks to Chet's home studio.