Quote:
Originally Posted by FrankHudson
YouTube?
You probably know that a lot of "videos" on YouTube are just a single placard and the audio.
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If one thinks that Soundcloud is to be scrutinized for squeezing their userbase, then YouTube is off the charts in this regard.
In 2019 alone, Google took what is
perhaps their most egregious overstep to date: totally disabling private messaging in YouTube. Not to mention, today, the average, non-paying user can hardly use their service without being subjected to the incessant pestering of having to skip the free trial offer for their paid services. Coupled with ads, I find it almost unusable, with nothing left to like about the platform other than the creative "content" they host, and, of course, the folks creating responsible for creating it.
Those artists and musicians with the motivation and/or requisite skillset will probably continue to lean toward self-hosting. This works well enough for individual tracks, depending on the level of desire for self-promotion and intended reach. For full albums, and especially if self-hosting is not viable, then Bandcamp still appears to be worth using for artists seeking to distribute free listening materials. Reverbnation is still free, as TBman mentions above.
Personally, I maintain that we should decrease our reliance on these mega-services like YouTube, whose model is no longer one of encouraging expression, but of commodification and capitalizing on the backs of hard-working creatives. Demonstrably, their contributions to the world offer only a steady reduction of the freedoms by which artists attempt to exact those desires of visibility, communication, appreciation, and the like...
...as Arthur Lee and Love said it so many years ago:
Sometimes I deal with numbers
And if you wanna count me
You can count me out!