Dark Arps (classic) Is Not A Professional Musician

More like a trust fund kid with a synthesizer museum.

Much ado has been made about the great damage we have done to the career of Jonathan Bierman aka Dark Arps (classic). This is hyperbole at best, and at worst an outright lie. Furthermore it is not our goal and never has been. Angry about the name thing and our music, he exaggerates and invents crimes against him to elicit sympathy and defame us. Historically we have been hesitant to defend ourselves against his impotent railings, but the time has come to speak.

In 2022 it’s easy to measure how much a musician streams and sells; it’s a matter of public record. Jon makes a pittance from streaming and record sales.

His Spotify account boasts 60 or so monthly listeners. If we examine his Spotify streams more closely, most of them come from remixes of other artists. This means pennies per month from streaming. No song of his (remixes aside) has ever reached 1000 streams, which sadly would net him a mere $3 USD. There’s simply no way he makes back what he pays his distributor to put those songs on the services. If he just stayed off he’d have more money in his pocket to spend on Eurorack modules or (please please Jon) music lessons.

Bandcamp is by far the largest share of music sales for artists too small to make records. A quick examination of his Bandcamp page shows that despite the entire discography costing twenty dollars, his releases average around ten sales per release, including those dating back as far as 2012. Most of his recent Bandcamp sales have come from the DAOC crew. “Broken Promises”, the first Metadata Records release boasts 11 purchases (4 from us), while the clumsily named “Phantasy”, a mere 7 (4 from us). These two records combined brought in a total of 11*5 + 8*7 ie $111 over the life of his “imprint” Metadata Records thus far (Aug 2021 to Dec 2022). Again, most of those purchases have been made by us, so we’re literally helping. Without us those releases would be sitting there with 2 or 3 supporters, and he’d have nothing to look forward to on Bandcamp Friday.

Finally we come to Beatport, darling of boomer ravers. A recently released track from “New Dark Arps” - “The Art of Mediocrity” leapt to the top of the Beatport “Dark Arps” chart after a mere five sales. After three sales it was #5, which strongly implies “Dark Arps Classic” does just as dismally on this platform as anywhere else; tens of dollars per release. If a Volkswagen Jetta full of people bought one of his Beatport tracks it would be among his greatest achievements.

There’s never been a vinyl Dark Arps or Metadata Records release because any fool can see it would sell less than a dozen copies. In his own words “He buys my music; nobody buys my music” (enraged by our purchases apparently, which he suspects are a “rousing goad”). There’s just no audience.

In 2022 it’s easy to fake streams, fake sales, and fake success. What’s harder to fake is failure; why would he?

Performance wise we have less of a lens. He typically plays shows he himself  promotes (Soundproof, Anza, Sequential Circus); notable exceptions being this years Electric Love Festival and a poorly attended show hosted by Calgary’s Oscill8 collective. In 2022, the boom year for parties after the long winter of Covid he has played about four shows.

Jon gets shows because of who he knows; it can’t be about his music or the size of his audience. This is one way he truly embodies the 90s rave era - he’s part of the “good old boys network” of aging bar stars here on the West Coast. His friends are no less likely to book him because D.A.O.C. or Duck Arps exists. He’s one of the boys.

The cash and/or beer tickets thus earned might, just maybe, might make a downpayment on his most recent synthesizer acquisition. Again the income is negligible and handily dwarfed by the expenses of his music hobby. It’s more like a paper route, or a lemonade stand. Economically speaking the best thing he could do is sell his synthesizer museum and learn a trade.

The final proof of this comes by his own admissions. In promo interviews, he says things like “I don’t know anything about the music business; I’ve hardly made a dime”. An old reddit post declares with rueful self deprecation “having made an abject failure of making any kind of living making music”. In the endless Facebook threads bitching and moaning about our music, he reveals lawyers have told him if he wants to sue he’d have to show damages and that’s the end of the conversation. There’s no “brand”, no “career”, no “sales”, no “audience” and therefore no damages. This is about hurt feelings, not money.

We are unsure how he affords his modest lifestyle and the vast array of expensive instruments he can barely use, but it’s certainly not music and it’s also not our business. While there have been many howls from the Facebook mob to imprison us, get us fired or litigate against us we wish no such harm on Mr. Bierman. We are just going to keep making music.

To his friends, fans and sycophants who clamor for justice we encourage you to support his music and spend less time on social media. If you ******* people supported his music as much as his bitching, his numbers would increase by an order of magnitude. Your buddy is having a bit of a rough time right now and he needs you. Spend an hour streaming his music. Buy a Dark Arps Bandcamp release. Take him outside and touch grass together.