Unstream - Brandon Lucas Green Building A Bridge for Independent Musicians - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi, and welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom, and, this is a show where I speak with musicians. I speak with people who create things for musicians, and with a focus on open source, federated Creative Commons sort of realm. This is really what I like to talk about, and today is a person who is two of those things for sure, a musician and a person who creates things for musicians. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do?
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah. Cool. Thanks, Tom. hi, I’m Brandon. I guess Brandon Lucas Green is my full name. I am a lifelong musician. I am a product builder. And, as of late, I have started building products and things to help myself as a musician and that, therefore, that is extended into helping other musicians as well. I, released music under the name Kid Lightbulbs, and, it’s kind of alternative rock, vaguely. I kind of dabble in a bunch of different genres. but, I’m a classically trained pianist, and that has informed, you know, my interest in, you know, classical music, the avant garde and things like that, and therefore independence and experimental music, which has kind of brought me into vaguely the realms that you see yourself in. and as a sort of product builder, I’ve been working in various forms of the tech industry over the years, and over the last couple of years, I’ve started kind of building my own stuff onto the side. And most recently I’ve been working on a product called Unstream. Unstream is a very simple little set of apps that will either allow you to search for artists that you like or detect artists that you’re listening to in your music player. And it will find and recommend other platforms on which you can support that artist. where it started with my. My journey of trying to build out my own music library and not wanting to pay for streaming services very selfishly. And I started, kind of digging around Bandcamp and, Qobuz and Mirlo, and I was like, oh, there’s actually, like a bunch of places where I can buy music and a lot of it’s good. And even these, like, more kind, of large established acts also have places where they sell their music online. and it’s really hard to keep track of all those places and what is the best place where the artist or the rights holder gets the most money as opposed to the giant tech platform. So Unstream was born out of that desire to, quickly find answers to those questions for any artist that I happen to like and want to support in some way. and from there it’s like spiraled a little bit into this really fun passion projects. I originally thought of it as like, maybe something that can make a little money. But, like, that’s not the goal. The goal is really to like, help more people find better ways to support music that they like and help more, especially independent artists get support that they very desperately need from people who might not know how to do that. so it’s basically like a free donation kind of supported project right now. It’s something I work on purely on the side for fun. and I’ve been like, adding little features to it here and there. And, yeah, I intend to keep kind of building on it and kind of use my chats with folks like you to kind of inform what it should do next.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And, first of all, where are you located right now?
Brandon Lucas Green: That’s a good question. I mean, let me talk about me. Yeah, I’m based in Massachusetts, kind of, kind of the central part of Massachusetts, like an hour and 15 minutes outside Boston. I, I live in a pretty rural town. My wife and I moved out here, actually just before COVID But it’s like an attempt to try and get out of city life and embrace things like remote work and a quieter life. so, yeah, that’s where I am now with, Got a wife, a kid and a dog, in our quiet little kind of farm town life.
Tom Ray: And now the typical question. Where did the name Kid Light Bulbs come from?
Brandon Lucas Green: That is a fun question. I don’t have a fun answer. like 15 years ago, when I was first starting to, kind of actually seriously write and produce and release my own music, I had this album, a very depressing, almost like trip hop that I was making. very, very dark, bleak subject matter. It came out of a very kind of sad, period after a breakup. And, the name of that album was Kid Light Bulb. Singular. and it, it was sort of this very loose metaphor for just like my brain kind of like very quickly, like, switching on and off in different directions. Like, almost like I worried that I was like suffering a bit from like, bipolar disorder at the time. I don’t have that. But, it was just like, it was really around, like, impulse and kind of like my brain kind of moving in a bunch of different directions. Kind of like a light bulb switching on and off. That was sort of what inspired the title. And since then, I’ve recorded a bunch of Music, like, played in a bunch of random bands, but the name always stuck with me. And I always thought, like, it would be fun to have, like, a band called the Kid Light Bulbs. so not in the. Not in the way of like, Kid Rock or Kid Cudi, where it’s like an, Like a MC name, but like more. More like Kid Brother or Kid Gloves, like almost like a descriptor, like Juvenile Light Bulbs or something. and, yeah, I just decided to adopt it in, like, 2023 when I started more actively, like nailing a sound and releasing music and trying to actively promote it as a solo artist.
Tom Ray: But you said it was from an album that was early. Was it in the earlier two? The album that you’re talking about?
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, I wrote it and produced in, like 2009.
Tom Ray: Well, here’s the funny thing, and this is an observational thing I’ve always had. And this was in the early 2000s. So I had started working, as a software developer in the early 2000s. I used to do that and then had worked in different realms of it and then went into marketing because none of them knew how to make websites. Anyway, that’s not the story. The story is I would run into many people in the early 2000s, and their handles and emails and all their personal accounts would have the word kid in it. Like, I knew a guy who. His was coffee kid. Another person was indie kid. But the thing was is when I was working with them, it was something they created, like in high school now they were in their 20s, they were getting older, and they were still going by all their personal accounts were still under, kid. And it was this weird observation that I had where I was like, that’s so strange that all of them refer to themselves as kid. And they’re like my age now. And I don’t know. So then it became ironic. Then it was the hipster ironic thing, I guess. But anyway, just an observation. I thought that was interesting around that time period. A lot of people use kid.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, it is really funny because now that you mentioned it, I think about, like, Kid Rock was obviously, like, huge for a minute when I was a teenager.
Tom Ray: I love that we’ve referenced Kid Rock.
Brandon Lucas Green: Very different beast now. Yeah. but like Kid Cudi. like, there’s a lot of different, There’s a lot of different personalities in the music industry. I feel like have kids something or something kid in their name. I’m struggling to think of other examples, but.
Tom Ray: Well, there’s Childish Gambino, so that’s Childish Gambino.
Brandon Lucas Green: but that’s not kid. There’s. Yeah, there’s, there’s quite a few if I like really think about it. And I was probably inspired by some of those names at the time.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Brandon Lucas Green: but what I think is really funny about that and specifically thinking about like, people who have had names and childhood, like, nostalgia plays a very big role in my music, both musically and lyrically. Like, I literally have a song called Nostalgia on the last album I put out. and I think a lot about getting older, especially now that I’m in my late 30s and I have a kid. And I’m very inspired by the music that I was very into as a child and teen. Like a lot of like 90s alternative rock and trip hop and industrial rock plays huge role in the music that I actually make. so I think it’s very actually funny that you bring that up like this, like, weird look back into childhood because like, it plays a huge role in like how I think about and write music.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And looking back to what you also said before too. So you. And the reason that I have you here mainly, but also because I found out that you’re a musician and I was like, oh, that’s fantastic. That’s a bonus. is, Ustream or Unstream? Sorry, I keep wanting to say you stream. Ustream was the original, like before Twitch, I think is what it was. Yeah, Ustream. So pardon me if I. And please correct me if I do say, I mean Unstream. now this platform, I discovered it, or actually was told about it on the social network. Social, music network Discourse. Simon from Merlo had posted a link to it and I checked it out and I was looking at it and it’s something that you created, for musicians. Now just to get this joke out of the way, because I always think of this when I think of people making musician apps. Have you ever watched the show Silicon Valley?
Brandon Lucas Green: Yes, I know very well.
Tom Ray: Do you remember when he went to go see the lawyer and he tells him about how Pied Piper started. And he tells the lawyer, he goes, it originally started out as a music app. And then the lawyer goes, ugh. Because there’s, you know, there’s classically no money in music apps, which you said you’re doing it as a hobby and because you are a musician. But I love that joke because I’m a musician and it’s like, there’s, there’s a nice little joke on the industry that I’d like to Build my creativity on. Anyway, so you created on stream and I went and checked it out and I was like, oh, this is nice. And one thing was, is you were linking to say, musicians, Faircamp and to their Mirlo page and to the other one you said
Brandon Lucas Green: Qobuz I was unfamiliar with that. Yeah. yeah, it’s a weird one because it is a streaming service, but also they have a download store. Kind of like how like Amazon Music or like the itunes store still exists even though they. Apple very heavily pushes Apple Music as a service. You can still download music from Qobuz. And the thing that I like about Qobuz that’s interesting is, is that their payout information is transparent and it is generally much higher than Amazon or Apple, which I think pay around like 50%, to the rights holder, whereas Qobuz pays about 70% if you buy and download an album. but yeah, like there’s a lot of services out there, many of which I like had not heard of until like maybe six months ago.
Tom Ray: yeah, I’ve seen more have been added. I’ve been checking on the site and more of them have been added over the past couple of months for sure.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the, the, the whole idea there is like, as I’ve been exploring what it is like to be an independent musician online. As kid Light bulbs, I was like, streaming isn’t viable. Like there’s all these other interesting experience experiments or ideas that are being pursued by like the folks at Mirlo or Simon, the guy building Faircamp So I’ve been really kind of curious about all those things. And then it kind of hit me that like nobody knows about this stuff other than kind of the circle and the circle of people who are in that circle and kind of the various kind of folks in the Fediverse who kind of get pulled in. And I was thinking about the fact that like, you know, my music is still on some of the streaming services. I took most of it off Spotify, it’s still on Apple Music, et cetera. But I’m like, it would be really great if someone was listening to my music because I happen to come across it and like, I don’t know, one of the two Spotify playlists I’m still on. And they had a very easy way to understand because Spotify doesn’t make this easy at all. if they had a very easy way to understand, oh, I can listen to this and support this artist in all these other ways, and they actually see the money and it doesn’t go to some other platform other than Spotify or Apple or any of those companies. And I found myself, like, really fascinated by that idea that, like a little utility app that can almost like bridge that gap that the streaming services are not willing to do.
Tom Ray: Right. Yeah. And that was one of the interesting things I saw about it, was this wasn’t an app going, oh, here’s another service for, While I appreciate the services, I use Mirlo, I use faircamp, I appreciate all that. It really is just after a while it can be like, well, where are you supposed to look for music? And that’s what Unstream is. It’s like, here’s where you can look for music, search for the artist. And then here it is kind of like, no, not really like. But the example I was going to give was how Hype Machine used to be for MP3 blogs before there were streaming services like you Hype Machine and just search for an artist and it would just show the blogs that they’re being reviewed on and the links to it. But the, the other thing too is you, And you’ve built this just you started, I want to say January 1st is when you started doing this. Correct.
Brandon Lucas Green: I’ve been sitting on the idea and kind of iterating on it quite a bit, like before that. but yeah, like, once it started, once I started kind of building it, it came together quite quickly. and you know, it’s just kind of snowballed.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And so how did you. How did you get started on it? How did you end up building it? I mean, I know I follow you on GitHub now and I know that there was a lot of rapid growth in the first couple of weeks of it. So tell me about building the app.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, this is going to be interesting because I am not a software engineer by trade. I am a sort of. I went to music school, I needed a job and I found my way into product management in tech. So I’ve like, learned quite a bit around the edges of software development, around the edges of database management. And you know, technical strategy is a part of my job to a certain extent. So I like, kind of know my way around how to work with engineers and. And AI has come very far. and I’m using, you know, Claude and cloud code quite a bit in my day job. And I do think there is a space where, while AI has no business in creative expression in music, Creation. It can be used to like build these great, you know, solutions to problems that exist. And I kind of, I use this phrase in, a blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It’s like they’re kind of like ruthless capitalism machines or capitalist accelerator machines or something like that. But if you point it at the right problems that I think are noble and worth solving, they can be quite valuable. So I’ve been kind of like noodling around this idea for a while. I have this real use case for myself and I, I basically opened up a Claude code instance. I was like, can you build this? And I wrote an actual spec. I, I wrote some design guidelines, some marketing, like messaging guidelines, like a rough draft of a marketing plan for like, what is it? What would it look like to bring this to the world? And I kind of just got to work and it. We, I, we came to this basically fully working prototype in like two days. And I kind of just, I opened up the web search locally on my, on my laptop. I started like running test builds of the Mac, what is now the Mac app, and just like kept iterating from there. And once it got to a critical point where it feels like, oh, this is ready to share, shared it and, built out what ended up being a very iterative process, but like a good workflow for, you know, the minute I have an idea, like, Claude can help me build it, right? And it’s really kind of sequestered to this project and it knows the project inside and out and it can help develop quickly and you know, add in like a new platform. I had an electronic music artist, reach out because he’s like, my results aren’t showing up right in search. And I was looking into it and this was actually one that I was able to figure out on my own. But I was like, this artist does not have a fair count. They don’t have, I don’t even think they had a band camp, but they have some music available on the music stores and therefore cobas. They also sell, singles on Beatport. So I started doing some research into Beatport and they had, they do offer downloads. They do actually have a pretty good payout. And electronic music artists, especially ones that like, are really in that scene, don’t really know the scene of the platforms that like you and I were just talking about, like fair camp Mirlo. But Beatport is like a life, like almost like a lifeblood to this particular group of musicians.
Tom Ray: So why not ebay for Beats too? It’s exactly you can not only sell your singles, you can go, here’s a vibe. I, got nothing for it. Or I created this and I, I don’t want it.
Brandon Lucas Green: Take it.
Tom Ray: Like, I’ve interviewed a few people that turned me onto that and told me how they use it.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, exactly. And I was aware of before, but I didn’t really think about it in this context. But then talking with this artist, just over two emails back and forth, I was like, perfect use case. Let’s go quickly scope this out. They had a very easily scrapable search engine and now it’s in unstream results. so it’s been this really interesting. Just like as things come up, why not try and add it, from there? And as, much as I mentioned, AI is a really tricky, fraught, problematic problem space, especially in music. I’ve been really trying to think of ways that I can leverage it to build good solutions for independent musicians like Unstream.
Tom Ray: Right. And this is more of a document. No, not documentation. damn. What would it be? Not tracking. Oh, I can’t think of the word. There’s a perfect word for what it does, but it’s more of a. It turns you on to where it is or, oh, I didn’t know they were on there. Seriously, if I go to Bandcamp, I don’t know what to look for. I don’t know what I want to search up. you don’t know what tags are being used. If you don’t know the band name, you know, you can see what it shows you. But then at that point it’s just like it may as well be the Huffington Post. I’m only going to see the articles it thinks I want to see. You know, it’s that sort of thing. And that’s what I like about this is you can just be. You’ve got a plugin for a browser. Oh. One thing I wanted to mention too. So getting a lot of this information, what I liked is you used. You utilize Music Brains for a lot of this for their day. the data that they have. Tell me about implementing that.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah. Ah, that was really interesting because Musicbrains and Listen Brainz, specifically because there is also a Listen Brainz integration where you can like Scrobble what you’re listening to there as well.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Brandon Lucas Green: So I had heard of Music Brainz, I don’t know, maybe a year ago. I never heard of it prior to this, but a contact, that I made over on threads, actually. His, name is Jay Hershkowitz. He’s building this Music Player called Paracord. He’d actually like, I think, fit in well to this little sort of like music alternative, kind of circle that we, we find ourselves in. he’s very connected to the industry side of music just based on his past experience. And he turned me on to music brainz. I was like, this is really fascinating. There’s a whole database here around music data metadata that I didn’t know was here. It’s like carefully maintained. I think it’s open source, but it’s like free access API. Listen Brainz was really fascinating to me because I was really interested in trying to more publicly share what I was listening to, but not having to rely on Last FM to do it. And then I started looking into ways that I can kind of scrabble my playback to Listen Brainz realize that it’s connected to music brainz and it’s like this whole network of things. So when I was kind of scoping out, how can I validate that the links that I’m sharing in Unstream are legitimate? I, I had a big problem because I was like, there’s no good way to do this other than, you know, hearsay or manually having each artist verify that their links are legitimate. Which kind of works for independent artists who are really invested in something like this. For major artists, it’s a lost cause. So Music Brainz very quickly and squarely solve that problem where I’m just again working with Claude to figure out what is the right way to ping this API in a performant manner and flesh out the results that show up. built out a solution and it works. The other side of the problem was, independent artists who might not have heard of musicbrainz. the first version of Unstream, I had some talking points that were like, go to MusicBrainz and go register and kind of fill out your database information. Which is great if you’re willing to take the time to do that. And the thing that I realized is very few musicians have the time or the willingness to go sign up for another thing and fill up m another profile with more information about themselves.
Tom Ray: But it is also, it doesn’t have to be the musician. It is more of a Wikipedia type format. Other people can fill out that, and that’s the benefit of it as well, is that they can, is that anybody can do it. Sometimes people are surprised to find out that they are on it and that’s because of the music community, you know. So I just wanted to add that point in there too.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, yeah, it is A great point. And it’s actually a good thing for me to think about because what I ended up doing was actually building a way for independent artists who claim a profile and fill it out on unstream. because there’s a lot of other. Just like noise and complexity. If you really dig into Music Brainz, there’s just a lot there. And I wanted to have something that is simple, but it is good to sort of also kind of share that philosophy around music brands where, like, it doesn’t have to be you to fill out this information. It’s really. If you happen to have information there, I’ll still pull it for your artist. And, like, just having the wealth of options feels like a good thing.
Tom Ray: Another thing you could think about, this is just me brainstorming here. And just because you are. You did say that you only learned about Music Brainz recently. There is an app that you may be able to build into what you’re doing. It’s called Picard. Picard is an app that is standalone app that lets you fill out. It’s kind of like, the way itunes used to be, where you could fill out the ID3 information.
Brandon Lucas Green: Sure, yeah.
Tom Ray: Picard is that way too. But also does an audio fingerprint. Maybe that’s something that could be integrated into the site where you could work it in there. When they create an artist account, which is another thing I want to get to is artists being able to create an account. But when they create their artist account or claim their artist, there is a way that they could add more information and maybe you stream. I don’t know how your database is working. Anyway, this is just me brainstorming. I know nothing about it and I’m just throwing an idea. But Picard, is something that might be able to connect those dots that you’re talking about. As far as, like, if you go to musicbrains, it is kind of overwhelming. It’s a literal, like, wiki type database sort of site and it can be very intimidating. but the other thing too is even if you make a mistake, it is well maintained. So it has to go through a process first before anybody lets you actually officially post it. Anyway, sorry, now I’m just brainstorming. Go ahead.
Brandon Lucas Green: No, this is great. I. If this devolves into a brainstorming session, I’m all for it because I find these conversations so energizing. but, yeah, I had heard of Picard, but I haven’t really had much time, honestly, to look into it more deeply. But honestly, with your endorsement, I’m gonna add it to my to do list.
Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah, I highly recommend it. And speaking of the to do list, this was the other thing I wanted to point out. So while you’re building this, what I’d like to mention is once I started looking at it, I can tell that you are involved in project, development, project management in a way. Because once I started looking at Ustream, I pretty much was very easily able to get myself up to speed with what you’re doing because you have meticulous notes, you have a roadmap, you have all this other stuff and I found that very refreshing. A lot of developers do document the stuff, but it’s all either locally or in one place or maybe they haven’t updated it in a while. I could tell that you were like, okay, I’m also going to very well document this. So tell me about the process of documenting and implementing the project that
Brandon Lucas Green: you’re working on here. Yeah, this is a really interesting one. I’m glad you brought it up because a lot of this was actually inspired by my current day job where I mentioned I have sort of this career in the tech industry. I worked in all these sorts of startups and for a while I worked for like a big e commerce player again as a product manager. and then in 2023 I ended up actually getting let go of ah, at one of those jobs and very, through a stroke of luck and serendipitous timing, ended up getting a job at this company called Buffer which is basically a social media management.
Tom Ray: Yep, I’ve been using it for the longest time. Yeah.
Brandon Lucas Green: Oh nice, nice. That’s great to know.
Tom Ray: And it works with Mastodon, so.
Brandon Lucas Green: It does. if you have any feedback for Buffer, I am also all ears because I am on the product team there. You can talk about that separately. But I’ve been working at Buffer for the last almost three years now and one of the big kind of values and key parts of the ethos of Buffer is radical transparency. And that is both internally and externally, meaning we publish our shareholder letters even though we’re not a publicly traded company. our staff information is transparent, our salaries, are transparent. we share our roadmap. We even have a public suggestions board where users can freely suggest features and there’s a lot. So it’s very hard to keep on top of it. I am one of the people who is responsible for keeping on top of it. But we feel very strongly as a company that is very important to Share what we’re doing and almost like challenge the norms of what companies share. one, because it’s like very key to building trust and accountability for us to be able to build and deliver the best product that we can and the best service that we can for the folks who kind of focus more on the service side. and then internally it’s the same thing. Everyone needs to be as transparent with each other in what we’re doing. Especially because as the industry moves faster as frankly AI pushes companies to be building faster and constantly be disrupting each other, the most important thing you can do is feel comfortable and trustworthy that you know everything that’s going on. so that has become really something I’ve internalized personally. And building this side project for Unstream. Again, I’m one guy, I don’t know really what I’m doing and I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to make this product better, and more useful, to different use cases for musicians and music fans. So I was like, I kind of just need it all out in the open. including the fact that I’m building this by myself with Claude’s help.
Tom Ray: you have early blogs on it about when you started before that too. You were talking about even just considering the idea. I saw those. Yeah.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah. So I think that has manifested in a couple different ways. One, I have a public feature request and kind of roadmap board where anybody can suggest a feature, they can upvote it and I will do my best to try and explore those things. There are cases that I’m like, this is really not that, important to me or something that I don’t feel complements the vision I have in mind for Unstream. but I wouldn’t rule it out, so I keep it on the board. I also have like the repo public. I have like GitHub issues and actually another music friend of mine opened a couple of GitHub issues for bugs they found. and I was able to fix those. so just like, honestly it’s been a way for me to build trust and to get help when I need it. and that has been very helpful, for me and I’m hoping that it reflects well in terms of like what I like. What I ultimately want to do is build something that is useful and a little bit different. and different in a couple ways. One, I don’t want to be just another music platform like you were saying before. Like, I don’t. I didn’t want this to Be another storefront that artists have to go upload a bunch of stuff to. Yeah. But I also don’t want to build something that is close and just like opaque and not clear into what its ulterior motive is. Because I found that either bad incentives force those things to become bad things, thinking about like, VC money and things like that, but then also like, if you don’t lay everything out on the table, people kind of just start to assume that you have bad incentives and you don’t have a bad, you don’t have, you know, good, faith with those people who don’t trust your motives. So I’ve kind of like forced myself to just be hyper transparent, because it hopefully like minimizes the chances that somebody doesn’t trust what I’m doing.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And is it because of just your background in it that, and I want to say this is the reason from what I said before that people who are developing stuff don’t normally take the best, transparency or forward, facing notes. And is it just something that you’re used to doing, making the time for it? Truthfully, I’m saying this because I do a lot of stuff and I have a hard time making sure it’s clear to anybody.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, no, it’s a good question. part of it was actually like creating transparent, like trust and knowledge for myself of what I’m actually doing. Because again, I am not really a software developer. So if I’m using an AI tool to help me build the thing, I need to make sure as a product person and like one is the voice of reason to this product. But also just based on my experience and working with software teams and you know, thinking about marketing implications and user impact, like I need to know what I’m building. So I’m, I’m, I feel it’s very important to build this documentation for my own sake. And then again because I am one guy and I’m, I’m not going to be able to work on this 24, seven, 365 days a year. Like if I am incapacitated and there’s like a problem or if artists really don’t like something I did and I’m like not able to act on it, or I just need help, it is there for someone to help me. If I need the help, it’s there.
Tom Ray: So if someone, since it is open, they could go, well, why don’t you do this? Or be able to at least follow the trail. I mean, generally what it’s meant for.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, yeah. I’ll give you, I’ll give you an example of one that I haven’t actually acted on yet just because I have other things that I’ve been kind of focusing on instead. But one of the things that really bugs me, and this is kind of a personal thing I don’t like. So I don’t like using other web browsers. Like, I use Safari as my web browser I’ve run into, which is a closed It’s a closed ecosystem. You have to download extensions from the App Store. I don’t like Chrome. I kind of like Firefox, but like, I don’t like other things about it. So I’m kind of a stickler with Safari. I also know that, like, a lot of not very technically savvy folks use Safari if you haven’t already downloaded Chrome. like, it’s the default.
Tom Ray: It’s like the IE browser.
Tom Ray: With the computer, you know.
Brandon Lucas Green: Exactly, exactly, exactly. So I’m thinking about, like the assortment of apps that we have from Stream. I have a Mac app which does require you to download a. A DMG file, install it. It’s not in the App Store. I have browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. And I’m like, I think I’m going to need to get to a point where I’m going to need to have this app available in the App Store. And like, for Safari, for people who listen to music on, let’s say, YouTube in Safari or SoundCloud in Safari and all those other use cases, I have not built that out yet. I’ve done a little bit of research trying to figure out what it would take to build that.
Tom Ray: And have you looked at the Scrobble app for that?
Brandon Lucas Green: a little bit. But I know that there’s some apps that I can get inspiration from. But I have this open GitHub issue that I open mostly for myself to be like, look into this. It’s a place for me to take notes on what I find. And m some random person on GitHub who I’ve never talked to. I don’t even know if they actually use the Unstream app, but they just left a couple comments of like, I built this other thing. And, and I ran into these challenges with like, this particular method, this other method, like, which is not really for music detection, really worked for us. Check it out. And it’s just there. And when I come around you like, revisiting this problem, I have this other resource that I can now look to instead of being completely on my own and that’s kind of what like that’s one of the weird like fringe benefits that I’ve realized after putting all this stuff online. comes from having it all online.
Tom Ray: Yeah, yeah. And sharing knowledge. even if it is just I want to show how much knowledge I have. It’s still helpful. It’s still a thing like that was going, oh, we’ve done that. But here’s our problem, you know, in or ah, telling you like you’re going to run into this just sharing that knowledge. Even though regardless of where it comes from. Yeah. You never, it’s always unexpected, it’s always. I’ve received many emails where it’s like, hey, I saw you did this. Have you ever thought about this? And it’s like, no, I have not. And it’s a brilliant thing.
Brandon Lucas Green: I didn’t even know this was a thing I could look into. Yeah, exactly. and that, that stuff like that has been what has been so fascinating about just like having more stuff out in the open online. And this is not just about like the unstream code base or GitHub issues or even like everything that I talk about on stream. But just like I have gotten so much value from just sharing more online generally. and some of that was informed again by my work at Buffer. But just like even just putting my music out there and having conversations with musicians and music adjacent people on threads in the Fediverse, in the social music network forum that I only joined like two or three weeks ago or something, there’s so much value that I’ve gotten out of just putting myself out there and having these conversations that I just find myself wanting to do more and more of it.
Tom Ray: Yeah. And here’s another thing too. while you’ve built all this, we haven’t even talked about, how are you maintaining it? So you’re hosting this, you’re getting all this information, you’re building a browser extension. How are you maintaining this? How are you, how is this all coming about as far as people? I don’t know how to word it, but you know what I mean, how are people seeing it? I don’t know.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, yeah. it’s actually a pretty simple app. it is a, it’s an API that is deployed through like and run through netlify. I’m using netlify’s free service to run this. I’m not actually paying for any hosting costs really. It’s maintaining a GitHub repository that I have. I’m using free GitHub, free Netlify. I’m pushing and managing the code in the GitHub repository and deploying it automatically to Netlify just through their integration. I have some recurring jobs running as GitHub Actions, but Netlify deploys and main and runs the API. The web clients and the Chrome Firefox extensions and the Mac app are all, deployed. Chrome and Firefox are deployed to those app stores. And the Mac app I’m just, deploying as a GitHub release. I haven’t done the Mac app Store thing yet, but I might pursue that. and each of the apps basically just ping the API that is deployed via netlify. It’s as simple as that. It’s actually not that complicated of a search API. It’s just scraping a bunch of things and pinging a couple APIs and cleaning and consolidating the results and spitting them out to the clients that interpret and render them. it’s very simple. And I’m able to do all of this on like free tiers of a bunch of different apps. There’s a few elements that I, need a database for. And I’m again using the free tier of a database service called Supabase. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. it’s Supabase, instead of Superbase. but it manages kind of the database and authentication layer for particularly artist verification and artist profiles. So if you are an independent artist and you claim, an artist in the search results, you can create an account and verify yourself. You, can set a password and then you can customize the links and those links and that relationship between the links, the artist and the user that kind of has claimed that artist that is managed in a database layer, again on the free tier of a service.
Tom Ray: Okay, I did want to ask you about that. You do have a claim, the artist, and you have been pushing that a lot lately about artists claiming it and then, talking about even correcting or updating. So if people do claim an account, what can they expect? What is that? What is that interaction like? What can they do?
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, yeah, it’s really simple. basically you again search for yourself in the Unstream app or web client,
Tom Ray: as all of us artists do, first thing.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, naturally. Honestly, that was the biggest kind of surprise that I was like, the people who are searching and using this app are not really music fans yet. This is like a marketing thing. That I’m working on. But, like, indie musicians just, like, ran to this thing. They’re all checking themselves. They’re all really curious. They’re all, like, replacing. When I saw the link. Yeah, yeah. And I quickly realized, like, I can’t maintain this. Like, I need a way for artists to maintain this themselves. So, yeah, you claim yourself as an artist. Very simple process where you give the app your email address. We send an email to you to verify your email address. And then there’s a very simple verification process where if you have a website or a profile on which you can add a custom link, we give you a URL for your eventual Unstream profile. You embed it in your website. Unstream will scrape your website to verify that it’s there, as if to basically confirm that you own that website that is representing you as an artist. And once we do that, you have claimed your profile. one of the things that I’ve run into a couple times is that there are some services that people use to host a website that will block Scrapers. So I’m thinking through a different verification process now that I’m hoping to get implemented in the next week or two to make this a little bit easier. But basically, that would be the process by which you claim your profile. Once you’re there, you have a very simple artist dashboard that you can, you know, log into, you know, with the email that you use to verify the profile. you can customize the links that show up. So the links by default will be the ones that Unstream scrapes and serves to in the search results. And you can now curate those links. So let’s say, like, the Qobuz link is wrong. It’s a different Lorenzo’s music that maybe exists in the world. You can delete that one. You can add your, you know, Pixel Fed feed if you want to. you can add a faircamp link. If I didn’t pick it up from the faircamp web ring. you can add your newsletter, which is something I don’t have a good way of scraping for right now. and it turns into, like, a little mini link tree for you, but completely free and independent of a service like linktree. and it kind of can serve that purpose. I built out some very, very basic, like, stats tracking, so you can track, like, how many people are searching for and coming across you in the search results, how many people are clicking on links. it’s a very overly simplistic feature, and I do want to flesh it out later. but that’s basically what’s in the artist account today. that customizable kind of page, the ability to customize how you appear in search and the stats. I have some other ideas that I want to build out for it later, but, that’s where I am today. The thing that I got really excited about, and this is why I’ve been really pushing it on my socials, is it becomes very exciting to almost have a consumer friendly version of an independent artist database, because I don’t think that really exists unless you come across the faircamp webring or you, are going to be very platform specific and look at Bandcamp’s directory or, you know, Mirlo’s directory. But it felt valuable to have sort of a platform agnostic version of that directory of verified indie artist and like a curated set of all of their links. I’m not sure what for, but, it feels like something that can be very powerful as like a, you know, a tool for those artists to collectively organize or for, you know, I don’t know, press, music, press to like go, kind of look at like this population of independent artists that are all kind of coming together and kind of evangelizing these other platforms on which music and these musicians can be supported. So I’m kind of just like scratching the surface of idea, this idea. But it’s very fascinating to me.
Tom Ray: Oh yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting to figure out which way to go. Much like you said, there are some things where you’re like, people will raise issues and sometimes you’ll be like, that’s not really the direction I want to go or otherwise. And it’s all because you want to do what will keep you interested rather than like, well, everybody really wants this, but I don’t want to do that. But everybody’s asking for it. Like, that becomes a problem. Of course. And one thing I did notice too, when you were talking about, it was kind of like a link tree. I did see on your website you do have an embedded version, of it. Or is that just a screenshot?
Brandon Lucas Green: I just realized now, I didn’t know it’s a re. It’s a real working event. I actually forgot, that I was. That the embed feature was actually like the impetus for me doing this thing. Because, I was playing around with little growth hacky ideas. I was like, what would be a fun thing that I could give to an artist to get them to share on stream for me? I was like, what if I could give them a Way to embed Lorenzo’s music on Unstream on, your website. You didn’t have to.
Tom Ray: Yes.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah. So you don’t have to go manually add each of those links. You can just embed your on stream profile and all the links are just there for you. and I was starting to build this out and I was like, I can’t verify that these links are legitimate. So if I can’t verify myself that Unstream search is actually correctly, you know, representing Lorenzo’s music and all of it, all of your bands links, I need you to have a way to do that in case you want to be able to use this embed and find it useful. So, I basically just ended up building this whole thing out because of that.
Tom Ray: That’s awesome. And the other thing too, with this being involved in the Fediverse, kind of pushed by the Fediverse, the fact that it’s indie artists. this is a weird transition, but I’m trying to find a way to get there. you do a thing where you say you cover Threads songs or you have songs that you did that are based on artists that you know on threads.
Tom Ray: I don’t get what that is. And I’m like, are you saying they’re inspired by threads that people made by other. I wanted to. I have a note here to ask that because I was like, I didn’t understand what that was. Explain that to me please.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, I will happily explain it to you. So this is a bit of a talker junk because it goes back to Kid light bulbs and my music stuff. But before I, let’s say immersed myself in the Fediverse, the social platform on which I sort of like really built a following first was threads like the meta product. and I very quickly found like a circle of musicians that really like we. We almost became friends. We. That circle expanded. I have like a pretty decent following there and I can like get a pretty good amount of engagement and discussion around like ideas that I share. And almost two years ago at this point, I was actually in the middle of promoting my or kind of building hype for what ended up being my second Kid Light Bulbs album. it’s called Step into the Ocean. There’s a song on it called Head on My Heart that m. I was thinking about putting out as a single. My whole strategy around like music promotion and everything has changed drastically since then. But this song had on my heart. I was like talking about and trying to build hike get people to listen to it. And I made this, like, stupid joke and I was like, what? It would be pretty funny if, again, this was a post on. On, Threads specifically. It’d be pretty funny if, like, a bunch of musicians on that are active on Threads covered Head On My Heart. And we made a compilation of those covers called Threads on My Art. Just like a stupid wordplay thing. Okay, all right. And very quickly a bunch of people responded and like, that’s a really cool idea. We should totally do that. And then one person was like, I really like that idea, but can I cover a different one of your songs? And then a few other people started saying that. And then what emerged from that, like two or three months later was a bunch of indie musicians that I had met on Threads covered 13 of my songs across two of my albums, and we made it into a compilation and we sold it on Bandcamp. It was free, like, pay what you want.
Brandon Lucas Green: And we, like, raised a couple hundred bucks for a couple of charities.
Tom Ray: Oh, cool.
Brandon Lucas Green: and it was really, really cool, like, completely out of nowhere born out of this joke. And, it now became a recurring thing where every time I put out new music, I was like, anybody want to do some more Threads music covers? And, ah, we did a volume two with my third album where six or seven other musicians covered most of that album. And we put that out as another compilation. I did a remix album, of people remixing my music all again music musicians that I met on Threads and this time Blue Sky. and, after I had released those three albums, I was working on a fourth album which I have since put out. But I also, like, was kind of running out of steam of just like writing and producing my own music. And I started just like kind of noodling on again, kind of as a joke, just to be funny. like cryptically making videos of myself covering songs of other musicians that I had on Threads. and the first one, this punk band called Death Weights, they’re not very active, on social, really any social platforms, but we’re still, like, we still keep in touch on Discord servers and things like that. They have this song called Empty Me and it’s a punk song. And I made this very creepy version of it on just piano and voice. And I posted a video. A bunch of people were like, this is really cool actually. And I turned it into a full production. and that was the first attempt of me covering a completely unknown indie band that I had met on Threads. And I’ve now done like, three or four of them. and something I have been thinking about as a project for this year is record a few more and like, put it together as some kind of compilation. Almost like returning the favor from the threads on my art thing I mentioned before.
Tom Ray: So that makes sense. And I overthought it. When I first saw that. I thought maybe what you were doing was you were just going through threads and just, making lyrics out of each one of the threads you read. Like, that was my first thought.
Brandon Lucas Green: No, yeah, it was. It’s a lot. Honestly. Like, it was very silly. It came out of a total stupid joke. It has now become like this very fun thing that I come back to every once in a while.
Tom Ray: Nice. I like that. And, before we wrap up here today, now I would like to ask, what do you have planned in the future? What do you have coming up that you’d like people to know about? whether it be your music or with, Unstream. what are some of the plans for the future?
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, thank you for asking. I have a whole backlog, ah, of ideas for Unstream that I’m kind of just gradually working on as I have time. and, I’m very excited about all that stuff, even trying to just get it in the hands of more people, both musicians and music fans. so if, anybody in your audience, presumably everybody in your audience is a musician or a music fan. So please check out Unstream, give me ideas if you have them, for what can make Upstream better, more cool, more useful to you, as a musician or a music fan. on the music, pure music side, I’m kind of slowly working on a fifth album. But I, keep getting stuck in a bit of writer’s block. So, I don’t know when that’s going to come out. I might do some covers. I am a weird musician in that, like, I’m kind of averse to playing live for some reason. So I don’t have any upcoming shows. I have sort of a set in my head that I have, like, half rehearsed as, like, a solo set. But I. I don’t have any, like, really obvious plans for, like, any shows or live streams. But if people want to check out my backyard, a lot of music. again, on Bandcamp, Faircamp amp wall, you know, all the places. ah, check it out. there’s four albums and a bunch of collaborations and singles and things there. it’s kind of a Journey. I will disclaimer that. but, if you like it, I would appreciate Elysian. I would appreciate any, support, any downloads or whatever. And if you have any interest in me putting out more music or wanting to see me attempt to play the stuff live, let me know because that will encourage me to do it.
Tom Ray: And how could people contact you if they wanted to get a hold of you? for, stream or for your music?
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, for either. I kind of like, to just be a guy who contains multitudes on the Internet. I don’t have different profiles for each thing, but, you can generally find me on a bunch of the social networks. I’m on the Fediverse as Kid Light Bulbs on, I guess the music world Social Mastodon instance. I’m on Blue Sky. I’m on threads. just search Kid Light Bulbs or Brendan Lucas Green and you will find me. I’m on in. I’m technically still on Instagram, but I’m not very active there. I’m on LinkedIn, even if that’s a place that you want to talk to me on. Although it’s differently. It’s very different.
Tom Ray: That’s all I’m going to talk to you on is LinkedIn.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, yeah, yeah. you can, you know, subscribe to my newsletter, or read my, like, random posting about a lot of this stuff. My website is begreen. Lol. or you can, you know, just search my music on any of the old music apps. so that’s almost too many options. But there’s a lot of different ways you can find me.
Tom Ray: And of course, where can they find Unstream?
Brandon Lucas Green: Great question. at, ah, the URL that I still find very amusing. Unstream.Stream. that is the website on which you can find Unstream. You can search right there for free, or you can download any of the apps or extensions, from there.
Tom Ray: Well, great. I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been great.
Brandon Lucas Green: Yeah, thank you, Tom. This was fun.