#icesnort

Oh, don't lay that at my feet. It started with the Bluesky post from Games That Weren't. In fact, I think it was a quote-post of that which said "You've GOT to hear the song that plays over this, because it will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day."

That post had already gone around a couple different discords I was in, so things were on the rise well before I did anything. I skimmed khinsider and Youtube hoping to find a higher quality version of the song, but all I could see were ancient gameplay footage uploads of the 1997 Windows version. But one of the Youtube videos linked to an Internet Archive collection of Moon Child stuff, where I was hoping to find a tracker module file I could export to MP3. No such luck.

But, as I stated in the other post, I did find a higher quality version of the same video from Games That Weren't. So I grabbed that and stitched together a version that got rid of the stuttering and crackling inherent to the music track in that video.

I was simply in the right place at the right time is all. But if I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. In fact, somebody else did:

A couple days after I put my version out, Ida Deerz went on a similar hunt for a clean version of the Amiga Moon Child theme. She found my version, but wasn't satisfied with the quality, so she used Ableton and seemingly sequenced her own clone with higher quality samples. Hers sounds super clean compared to mine!

If I hadn't taken the opportunity to make and upload my version, hers might be the one with 75,000+ views right now.

If anything elevated the status of Moon Child, it was either that original post by Games That Weren't, or it was Icesnort latching on to it and rapidfire producing a dozen YTPs in a week.

Icesnort obviously knows their way around an editor, you know what I mean? That's not a person that needs me to fix the song for them. Even though, obviously, they are using my version (the echoing outro was my addition, and it's present in some of these YTPs).

I'm still calling this coincidental.

Mostly it's been a reminder of how steep the requirements are to earn money from Youtube. I've said it before, I don't intend to enable monetization on my game dump channel (that's the whole reason it's called the game dump), but I look at the last two weeks of Moon Child blowing up and it's like...

That's maybe halfway. From 75,000 views. In practical terms, this means that 99.9% of what gets uploaded to Youtube is not paying the person who made it. Every time you get a recommendation in your sidebar from someone putting out decent production value for a video that has less than 5,000 views, they are losing money because their channel has not passed the monetization eligibility threshold. They spent money on all that gear, all that time in editing, and they haven't seen a penny from any of it.

Egads! My big ham is ruined!