Aloha and thanks for your support. Mixcloud now charges me $180 a year to host more than 10 programs. Since they started offering subscriptions, formerly known as SELECT, they have collected over $1200 from those of you who have subscribed to THE BLUE BUS (Starstreams wasn't offered on that basis then). Many thanks! Despite this, Mixcloud is still struggling because they ignored advice I offered a few years back of just charging all content providers a yearly fee of $95. They have to charge double that (and they are still on shaky financial footing) because they let the majority of users provide content (now up to ten shows) for free.

Unfortunately, I got a mere approximately 18 to 20% of that $1200 after years of collecting it from you generous folks listening to THE BLUE BUS! So with two main channels it doesn't pay for their charges to me for even one year! They take a much larger percent of the subscription amounts and claim they pay them to the artists you're listening to, which is mostly bunk. Why? Because they don't even know what artists are playing, despite adding playlists each week. Why? Because they ignore the playlists and instead use an ID system from Gracenote (a Nielsen company) that "listens" and IDs the music for them. This system is a joke. It's great for MAJOR labels but doesn't recognize songs from small labels and even more egregiously misidentifies songs and these get reported. So artists that aren't even getting played are being paid from your subscriptions! Mixcloud refuses to require playlists and report those playlists to places like SoundExchange, that collects money to pay to artists. Instead, they keep the false narrative alive by claiming they are paying artists, which in way too many cases they are not. Still, they deduct this from all the subscription fees they collect on their service. To add insult to injury, you and I subsidize all the freeloaders who post content on Mixcloud, now limited to ten programs (and more by creating multiple free accounts).

So, help avoid this unfortunate ruse by TIPPING which is a direct payment that I will apparently get 80% of. We shall see. Bottom line when it comes to Mixcloud, FYI, is that TIPPING helps me out way more than a monthly SUBSCRIPTION and if you'd like to help even more, then become a patron at https://patreon.com/starstreams plus receive music reward premiums when you do! Again, MAHALO for your support! Forest

PS - Don't misconstrue this post as not liking Mixcloud. For all it's noted shortcomings, it's still wonderful that they supply the service they do.