Well, first a bit about who I am. My name is Ken “Flux” Pierce. I am a sound designer, music producer, music technology consultant, and blogger.
I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most amazing companies and people in the music industry and I love to share those experiences with people who are as excited about music and gear as I am.
Unfortunately synthesis, sound design and music technology tends to be a rather niche playground and doesn’t garner quite the viewership as something like spouting flat earth theories or opening surprise eggs on video. This has lead me to search out better ways of interacting with my audience.
YouTube is the obvious home for video content and I do fairly well for a niche program on YouTube, today my current subscriber base hovers close to 9000 with almost two million views. Not to bad for someone talking about obscure products and techniques only utilized by a handful of people. Unfortunately that number certainly is barely covering the expenses of electricity just to run the gear for these shows.
Patreon many suggest to me just feels, well dirty. I don’t like the idea of segementing my audience further behind pay walls.
Vimeo is a joke, as is Facebook. Sure I can gain viewership but the interaction tends to be very messy with threads across multiple groups etc.
So here I am on Steemit. Wondering whether there will be an audience, is there a growth opportunity? My initial reaction when I heard about steemit was a slight scoff with a bit of hope. The idea of someone’s creating a legit competition for YouTube, is what really got Me interested.
The questions remain: Will steemit grow quickly? How is the audio compression and video quality going to hold up compared to other platforms? Will niche users like myself have a fair go of it?
It took five days for my account to be approved and set up. That felt excessive and hopefully that is just a beta issue. There also seems to be a bit of a learning curve just to understand what the platform is as a whole. I have a ton of questions and a ton of videos I need to watch.
I plan on uploading a ton of content from NAMM 2018 as my account was approved just in time (I fly out to California tomorrow). I hope I can find and connect with the people that make the music tech community so much fun.
Here is hoping this journey has a happy ending!