Hauntshade aka Richard Hasselt.
“Blending lyrical storytelling with cutting-edge technology, Hauntshade crafts, at times, deeply personal and evocative songs that try to capture the human experience. With every verse and prompt, he shapes melodies that transcend algorithms, trying to keep emotion, originality, and artistic intent at the heart of his work. Through the unique fusion of songwriting and innovation, he tries to redefine the boundaries of modern music—where creativity leads, and technology follows.”
I enjoy creating songs that I actually like to listen to myself, I enjoy spending time writing the lyrics and refining my prompts to get as close as possible to what I envisioned when I wrote the lyrics (and prompts). The whole process is not a simple “click the button” and you have a song. I actually want to try and create quality content. I also go through the process of mastering my tracks to improve on the quality. I am not doing this to make money, I’d rather create 20 tracks that are good and enjoyable to listen to, than 300 shitty tracks just to flood the streaming platforms with low effort slop every month.
PeerTube.
You can listen and watch lyric videos on my PeerTube.
At Hauntshade’s PeerTube you can listen to all my music for free, no subscription needed. No third-party analytics. No tracking. No algorithms. No ads!
Streaming.
You can find my music on: Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, iTunes, Pandora, Saavn, Soundcloud, Spotify, Tencent, YouTube Music*.
(* YouTube Music has recently refused to publish a few of my albums, despite my publisher sending the albums to YouTube.)
Social Media.
My main (official) social media is Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube and this blog/website. Apart from Pixelfed, I host my own social media because i want full control of my own content, I would rather pay with money than pay with my data. I still have my (big tech) social media profiles (Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, TikTok) but i rarely use them anymore and even deleted most, if not all of my posts. Some (like Twitter/X) have been completely deleted. So if you want to follow me on social media and want to make sure you are not following some scammer pretending to be me, follow me on the accounts linked on this website.
Donations.
While I provide my music for free on my PeerTube, the creation, publishing, and hosting is not free. The streaming platforms barely pay anything (Spotify does not payout to smaller artists with low stream numbers and Soundcloud does not pay because: “we’re only able to approve content created with our AI integration partners for distribution or monetization“), it actually costs me more money every month to have my music on those platforms than I make back from people listening to my music. I never started this with the intention of making money, but it would be nice to have the music pay for itself and cover all costs.
If you feel generous and would like to support what i am doing you can use Liberapay.
Blog posts published into the fediverse through #ActivityPub.
Follow my main Mastodon here: https://hauntshadesocial.nl/@hauntshade
