Corpo buyouts and consolidations are looking like the leading business "plan" for independent music. The people who make it, cover it, and support it keep getting squeezed. And the squeezing gets pitched to us as good news or swept under the rug.

I think it goes without saying that, for many of us, faith is difficult to come by these days. And yet, it’s required of so much of what we do. In the case of the artist’s work, as it were, that’s especially true.

When I first started thinking about building the app that would become Tape Trade, I called it "Houndstooth" because I was in the midst of a number of sewing projects and it seemed cool to be named something non-specific to audio. That name evolved to be the name of the MVP product, which showed up ...

Like many people in this city, I first met Julian Maya when he was working behind the bar at St. Pete Brewing Company, a semi-regular in search of a beer who had no idea just how talented and dedicated to his craft he was.

When I was a much younger woman, I remember when the animated-only band Gorillaz went on tour and thinking something along the lines of, “Literally, how?” Maybe it was being a broke-ish college student at the time and the haze of waiting tables at a mall Italian restaurant. But paying a concert ...

Data is one of the most valuable commodities on the planet, and the people sitting on the biggest piles of it are a shrinking club of media and tech conglomerates horse-trading billions of dollars and data harvested through surveillance tech. There are obvious exceptions, but streaming services, ...

“Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening.” Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composers Sound Practice, 2005 Link to FRFT Winter 2025 Mix.

It's hard out there. It's virtually impossible to keep track of what companies are engaging in extractive business practices, either as ad-tech surveillance to auction your info to the highest bidder, and/or feeding your content into the juicy maw of a proprietary LLM. Thus- we thought it might ...

Reading Please Kill Me on the middle school bus. Dumpster diving in high school for Pepsi bottle caps because Apple was doing a “free song with every bottle” Pepsi promotion around the Super Bowl. (LimeWire was too taboo for the family computer.) Collecting literal change in a styrofoam cup with ...

A friendly reminder that Tape Trade is a lossless streaming and storage platform. After you upload, you can send your collections to anyone, anywhere, for easy streaming and download, or just review your own music anywhere the way it was meant to be heard.