Why We Will Never Make Anyone Pay For Our Music
In the past, you used to be able to buy music in a physical format such as a vinyl record or a cassette or a CD, and that would be the only way to listen to it. Later, with the advent of the Internet, everything transitioned to the point that music now has to be brought online through digital downloads, which often are blocked by a paywall. While musicians still offer physical media, people began to prioritise convenience more and buy digital downloads of music now. It's either that or listen to it online through a streaming platform, where you may need to subscribe to stop advertisements from interrupting your music listening experience. Here's the problem and reality though. Most people do not want to pay to listen to music, so they either listen to it online via a video platform like YouTube (where these days constant advertisements interrrupting videos is a problem now unless you subscribe), or they engage in peer-to-peer file sharing and torrenting to acquire the files for free to listen uninterrupted.
Which is why instead of forcing everyone to have to subscribe on some platform that wants your money (which often gives very little to the artists) to listen, we give you the raw audio files compressed in ZIP archives to download for free on our trusted third party file hosting sites (since right now we don't have the financial means to host it ourselves). Even if there is a website that does compensate artists fairly, there may be some terms and conditions and privacy policy terms that conflict with what we feel and know protects and benefits us.
Furthermore, if we were to have everyone pay for our work, we would have to punish anyone who does not pay us in some way such as sending DMCA notices, getting legally involved, etc. and we do not want to do that. No one should be jailed for downloading and distributing mere files. If we do collaborate with law enforcement it could potentially compromise our anonymity even if they try to convince us otherwise. It is not worth the trouble. And also we do not impose copyright licenses on our music. Then we would have to be paranoid about who's breaking the law. We put a disclaimer in every album that talks about these issues. It can be found in the README.txt file.
Also, we feel that imposing paywalls would create a situation that one album would get an unfair advantage over the others for a song's specific sound and its massive popularity. We would end up feeling pressured and obligated to create more songs with that same sound simply because it makes more money and is more popular than other songs with different sounds. While it is admirable to have some popular songs, the presence of profit would take that admirability away for this reason. And we would rather do this project out of artistic expression rather than out of playing the fame game. Which would be pretty overwhelming for us. We like to keep a low profile mostly to avoid trouble.
Instead, we offer everyone the choice to donate to us using Monero, an anonymous open-source cryptocurrency that is reasonably safer than Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. For more info go to http://monerotoruzizulg5ttgat2emf4d6fbmiea25detrmmy7erypseyteyd.onion/index.html. You can donate any amount you like, preferably more than 0.01 XMR. Our XMR address at the moment of writing this is
88h9oEtiJik2ya8RXxcGrKGvz9H79T9QmjmDbVMYaTT4Wsvq9M3sD1aZR7KaYbgvqCBXvAHzdG2bARnFxRze8LJWRSAbovP
This address may be subject to change.