So. Content.
I've you've followed various publications over the years, you might have noted the sad demise of a few favourites. LittleWhiteEarbuds and Juno Plus come to mind here. The enthusiast scene and writing content isn't exactly something that go hand in hand with remuneration unless you find yourself on one of the few top tier sites. For my purposes, I cram everything in around doing my day job and I do it for free. Listening to music, talking to PR, speaking to artists, sorting out the content and making it nicely formatted - it all takes time. I'm usually cramming it into scant hours after the kids are asleep, on the train (less so now my MacBook died) and at lunches. It's incredibly fatiguing and easy to see why outlets end up winding up.
Obviously you would love to have a reward. There is the constant stream of digital tunes. Sometimes labels will be kind and give you a vinyl dump. Sometimes you just want some currency without having to pimp yourself out to do PR copy, though. Patreon is an avenue, but it always feels like a sacrifice of what you want to focus on in order to provide reward tiers. Ko-fi is a low commitment donation engine, but low commitment often means no commitment. So I'm going to have a stab at something a bit esoteric. After poking around recently, I stumbled upon Steemit. Essentially think of it as Reddit (ish) except the upvotes translate to cryptocurrency. Steem is no Bitcoin, and doesn't have a fancy technology disrupting idea like Ethereum, but the concept of monetising content is intriguing. My mind is starting to drift off to concepts of websites having Steem intrinsically tied into their structure.
Right now, there is a huge gap in electronic music writing there (i.e. none) and I'm waiting to get active to see how things go. It would be interesting to see if cryptocurrency could provide a solution for creative content producers. I'll give you all a Twitter hookup once I start pumping out some content. Not a cash beg, as I think you have to be registered to upvote. No public spamming. But yeah, let's see what this is like.
