Manifesto

"So welcome to the terrordome..." that is, the landscape for independent musicians in 2026:

• Too many bands, and not enough playlists - good music goes unheard and lost to time.
• AI can create hundreds of songs in a short time span (literally 30+ songs per hour if you want it to at the time of this writing) and people are using it to make the signal to noise ratio much worse. There is probably a place for AI music, but HUMANS NEED THEIR OWN LANES - and the major streaming services have been SLOW to even add filters or react at all.
• Bands make 0 money... even 100k plays @ $.005 per stream - that's only $300 to $500 for the band... and the only way to do that is to pay for ads and constant submissions to influencers; you literally have to spend $x per listen. The major streaming platforms don't even allow musicians to sell albums easily or collect donations. If you had a painting, would you sell a print for pennies (I mean, yeah, you'd give away some etc., but wouldn't people want to pay and gladly support you as an artist)? We are forced to do so with our music. If people enjoy it they would gladly buy your album - if only the option were easy and integrated with the streaming platforms. As it stands you have to figure out how to get people to go to a separate site to donate or order.

This is discouraging to say the least - and on top of that, finding bands' live shows in town is even more difficult - the major concert calendars don't list local, and if they do they are often missing links to even hear the bands. Fans are reduced to searching through various venue or local paper calendars - who do not receive submissions from a central source, so if a band or venue didn't tell them, the show is as good as a speakeasy. Fans searching for new bands to go see find themselves in 'copy-paste-search' hell and often give up after the first few. I am using tech (including AI) to gather show calendars from disparate sources, find the bands' music samples, and allow users to easily search a concert calendar and LISTEN to the bands playing in town - this is now in beta at demojail.com/shows.

The ability to get your song out there and let it really get enough listens and rankings to 'honorably' sink or swim without having to pay for listeners seems nonexistent... and no one seems to be doing anything to fix this. The lack of curated internet radio means that everyone is playing different stuff - which is good in measure, but we still need some curated community around stations (not just playlists) so we can have shared music that we can all say 'yes, I heard that band too!' about. College radio helps, but their playlists are so divergent now that it makes it hard to really have a regional or national shared 'scene' anymore... we need more 'bubble up' radio - where we don't have to pay influencers or anyone else to get listeners... radio that plays good, interesting stuff but also sets up a tiered system to allow listeners to rate songs and give even the worst demos (and trust me, I have written a lot of those noise polluters myself over time!) a fair shake to bubble up, or sink and go away. We have the tech to do this, and that's what I intend with demojail.com/radio.

There are other hurdles that I could mention right now... specifically with communicating with fans - that's why demojail.com provides mixtapes (podcast/radio DJ meets playlist), live chat, band announcements, and local scenes/city pages that bring it all together - but I won't go into specifics right now, since we are all so A.D.D. at this point I doubt many of you had time to read to this point anyway :)

So in a nutshell, this is why I decided to create demojail.com. It is beta... a work in progress... but I hope you will help me see it grow... I will continue to apply my skills and time to help the local and national independent band community grow and heal in any way that I can.

Bands, I hope you will do the same and set up your profiles and upload music - pick some songs to put into rotation - let's do this, dammit!

(This message was 100% written by a human, aside from spelling correction - thank you, AI :)

New here? Read the beta tester notes on the home page.