Hello! Thank you for the immeasurable joy and comfort and inspiration your art has brought me. Your music supported me through a bleak period of failure in a creative profession & into sobriety. On that journey I learned that the career I wanted isn't possible anymore, now that markets operate in response to algorithms tuned to funnel money up past most artists to the algorithms' shareholders. The artists who do see return on their investment are the ones most valuable to maintaining the structure. Some make art I love, but they're still exceptions that prove the rule.

After I found new (in my case, local) avenues to share art and new ways to understand myself as a creator (vocation vs. profession), my art practice bloomed in unexpected ways. I'm not investing energy into a market that wants to eat me. When you say "no one's buying music, so how do we sell them something they're already getting for free?" I think you're naming the heart of the problem. Bottomless algorithms convince users that "free" means without cost elsewhere. And algorithms need endless input, art or slop doesn't matter, to keep us scrolling.

That's not the relationship I want with artists I love. I've been preparing to divest from Spotify & will be buying music directly from artists in the smaller but more reciprocal economy I've found as an alternative for my own work. Your albums will be the first I buy. I'm only sorry I hadn't bought them before. There's no way for me to overstate their impact on me. I encourage other interested readers to find opportunities for reciprocity that might work for them -- could start as simple as amplifying artists in the algorithm!

Thank you, Alex, & love forever, 🤍