2021 Wrap-up and Plans for 2022 (Patreon)

Happy 2022 friend! Here's to a great year 🥰

First, I want to send a ton of love to my Patreon supporters. Your continued involvement in my life and creative work has been a huge driving force for me. Admittedly, there are times where the weekly song obligation is tough, but I'm definitely happy for the encouragement to keep at it. We made so many cool things this year!

The Patreon community continued to grow. We started the year at 56 patrons and now we are sitting at 71. As always, I'm very happy with slow and steady growth.

Despite the general unpleasantness of this year, a lot of great things happened; let's focus on those!

First, the Two Hour Track Challenge brought some pretty incredible songs into the world. My top three favorites, in no particular order:

Some Day, All This Will Be Gone

Heck With It

S.A.D. [Seasonal Affective Disorder]

Always tricking picking just three songs, but I feel they really represent how far I've come since this challenge started six years ago. The first 2HTC episode was on January 20th, 2016. Very hard to believe that it's still going on. 😅

On the game development front, I feel like I started a lot of things and didn't really finish anything. Pawndemonium is nearly done and I want to try to get that released this month. Hyperthread is still in the primordial stages, but I want to spend some time rebuilding it.

I want to focus more on prototyping and getting lots of little things out there rapidly. I do feel the urge to make larger scale games, but at the moment, I feel like I need to just get more comfortable going through the process of releasing things. Kinda like with music production, I need to learn what my threshold of "done" is with game development.

As always, let's talk about income and expenses. I want to keep this trend going for transparency:

Total Revenue: $33,773.91

Streaming: $16,536.27

Commissions/Royalties: $9,482.21

Gumroad: $4,171.00

Patreon: $2,804.04

YouTube/Twitch: $584.94

Steam/Itch.io: $195.45

Total Expenses: $7,186.70

Taxes: $1,500.00

Charitable donations: $1,162.13 🤯

Software/Hardware for music making: $1084.08

Collaboration royalty payouts: $1,067.16

Investments: $1,000.00

Business hardware (hard drives, new phone): $467.16

Subscriptions (Splice, software, domain names): $290.61

Album art commissions: $183.76

Music equipment Insurance: $175.00

Fonts: $159.80 😳

Books/Inspiration: $97.00

So yeah, overall it was a very good year. Primarily, the streaming revenue came from working with pretzel.rocks. Unfortunately, the other shoe has dropped with them and my revenue has gone back down. For a long time, the sheer volume of my library kinda dominated the platform. Recently, they have brought on many other chillout labels and the amount of play my songs have received is diluted. However, more variety on the platform will bring in new users and I expect things will even out a bit more.

The good news is that the bulk of this income got funneled into my monthly mortgage payments. I am excited at the prospect of paying off the house this year in large thanks to my creative work! That will be a huge milestone for me and will potentially open doors into having a part-time job to pay the bills and having more time to focus on making music and games.

So what is planned for this year? Looking at my goal list from last year, I'm pretty proud that I accomplished almost all of it. I want to keep my list attainable again this year so let's go:

Host four Two Hour Album Challenge events (and the OST Game Jams that emanate from it)

Host two single remix events (last year's Cinders and Skypiercer were a ton of fun)

Finish the Let the World Forget Us album

Another patron-exclusive album (Quiet Spaces Vol 2 coming April 2022)

Release Pawndemonium and Hyperthread on itch.io.

Continue to build and grow a community of creative folks on the Discord.

Look into some short runs of physical merch.

Write some eBooks!

It's a bit of a condensed list, but there is a lot of work in there. I'm excited to get going.

If you've read all this, thank you so much for your attention. I feel that I'm taking the slow and deliberate road to creative success, but I can definitely see the progress! Looking forward to having a wonderful 2022 and I hope you can join me along the way. <3

-b²

(prior year updates: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017)