Update: The Best Razed Plans
So, I imagine most of you are pretty confused. First off, I’ll just cut to the chase for those lazy bums who go out of their way to read as little possible. You’re the reason why my class got chewed out by the professor for making third-grader mistakes in College Writing. In short, my YouTube channel deleted itself and never came back. Gone is the channel I started all the way back in 2010, gone are all my videos with all their views and lovely comments, gone are my subscribers. Plain and simple.
For those of you who are still here, you may be wondering to yourself, “How on God’s good green Earth did that happen?” Well, I’d planned to turn my main channel into my now-discontinued idea known as Tunecastle, a channel for video game music arrangements and remixes. However, my main channel was linked to my personal Google+ page. Normally, I couldn’t care less about anything to do with Google+, seeing as it’s about as irrelevant and redundant as it gets when it comes to social media. However, it’s forcefully hardwired into one’s Google account and there are people who use it (why they do is beyond me), so I figured it’d make more sense for the Tunecastle channel to be linked to a Tunecastle Google+ page. Upon researching how to do so, I discovered that you could transition your YouTube channel into being linked to a “brand account”, which means you’d get a dedicated Google+ page and still keep all your videos, views, and subscribers (that turned out well).
At the time, my idea was to make Tunecastle into my main channel, and upload weekly videos of something I already knew generated traffic (at the time, my ‘Alone in Space’ remix of Dire, Dire Docks had almost 100,000 views) and save my original music for later. That way, once I had a decent platform built up, I could start making original material my main focus. Oh, how wrong that all went. Upon attempting the transition, both my personal channel and the new Tunecastle channel I’d made (from which I was adopting the Google+ page) had completely vanished. Kaput. Done-zo. When I navigated to a page that listed all my YouTube channels connected to my Google account, it only showed my profile with the text “no channel” below it.
Perhaps it was a mistake to go ahead and create a new channel in its place once I saw this, but if it wasn’t showing due to the transition (which doesn’t make any sense, because I was just changing the Google+ page it was linked to), I was never given any notice or indication telling me so. I even tested whatever links I had to existing videos on my channel. I mean, why would the URLs themselves be affected? However, they came up with that infamous “This video has been removed. Sorry about that.” message. Everything. Gone.
To be honest, though, instead of this being a crushing blow, I’ve started to see it as a blessing in disguise. It forced me to reevaluate where I wanted to spend my time. I tried to keep Tunecastle going for a little while, but I quickly ran out of steam on that project, not because I didn’t enjoy doing it (I mean, I wouldn’t work on a channel dedicated to something that I didn’t enjoy), but because it’s not where I wanted to focus all my effort, especially musically. It felt more like an obligation to myself than something I looked forward to. Also, around that time (but before my channel went poof) I started doing game commentary videos, which again, I enjoyed to a certain extent. However, editing would take several hours, and that’s time I knew I couldn’t afford to spend indefinitely.
What I guess I’m trying to say here is that for a time, I was willing to try anything. I felt like I wasn’t going to build an audience off of ambient music, which is a relatively unpopular music genre. I was desperately searching for some other outlet that I felt could generate buzz more quickly, and in the process, pretty much the entire year of 2018 has been wasted. I seem to be quite good at that. In the meantime, if I had stuck to my guns and put the effort in, who knows? Cloudland Connections may have been done by now, and I might’ve started generating some considerable cash flow. I seem to have these sorts of identity crises often, and I apologize for the massive confusion that comes out of it. The truth is, I’m a guy who likes to do a lot of different things, and I feel like I could be good at a lot of different things, but spreading yourself so thin is not how you make progress in today’s world. This whole crash-and-burn situation with my channel forced me to return to the simple questions of what I really wanted to devote my time to and why.
To be honest, I don’t know how many people actually “follow” me, that is, pay attention to my updates, read my posts, actively try to seek me out when I do something stupid like accidentally delete my YouTube channel, et cetera. If you’re reading this, please leave a comment below. I’d just like to know who’s there, so I feel that these second guessing games are worth it. So, what now? Well, first off, I’d like to try and remove myself from the video game arrangement scene as much as I can, without being a total jerk and just deleting them all to force people to pay attention to my original work. However, I’m going to use the Tunecastle moniker for all those arrangements, so expect to see those disappear from my main SoundCloud and reappear on my Tunecastle one. Also, I’m currently trying to make further headway with my Cloudland Connections album project. The next track I’ll be releasing will be titled Moon, and I’m also completely reworking and extending Dream of Flight from my EP. I’ll keep you guys posted. Have an awesome day.