You heard of life by the numbers? The idea that the older you get that you have already spent 90 percent of the time on anything you have done in life, spent 90 percent of the time you ever will with people in your life, already unknowingly done things for the last time ever. Come to find out this is not a highly written about topic and is something my dad always talked about and I’ve heard from a few places, but not enough of the world understands the world this way, and math always tells the truth.

The most obvious is the parent-child or child-parent connection, I know there are a lot of examples of different ways people were raised but just use the average nuclear American example that for the first 18 years of life you go to school and come home and in those 18 years, at least the first 14–15 years pretty much every single day you saw the people raising you, you spent time with them good or bad, you slept in the same house, so to be safe just use 15 years x 365 days, that’s 5,475 days, which doesn’t seem like many days if you think about it, but now think about after 18, from 18–60. Now unless you live or work on a daily basis with the people that raised you a safe assumption would be maybe once a month, 12 times a year x 42 years(average age of death 80), that’s only 504 times you will spend with the people that raised you once you turn 18 until they die. This is fine when you are 18, you don’t think about the fact that from this day on you have already spent 90 percent of the time you ever will spend with the people that raised you, but time is unapologetic and 12/year ends up being more like 2–3/year because that’s just the fucking way life goes

Now you are 40 and an old best friend from school calls you up to hang out because they are in town, and you don’t because you are “busy”, then they die the next year and you feel bad because you didn’t hang out. But I bet you can’t even remember the last time you hung out after spending almost every day together for 8–10 years, that’s around 3,600 times you hung out and created memories that you remember to this day, but you can’t remember when the last one was, or why it happened, because life just happened and everyone moved on, good or bad. Meanwhile when they called you, you were still in the mindset that everything lasts forever but it doesn’t, so next time answer the phone and do something about it. This applies to every single aspect of your life, these are facts, numbers don’t lie.

You ever wonder how we all get so attached to our animals? I don’t, not after running the numbers, we literally feed them twice a day every single day of their lives until they die, this would be like raising a kid and they die by the time they are 18, but more like 10–12, so stop wondering why you are so sad when your animal dies, it doesn’t get to spend the next 42 years after it turns 18 deciding if it wants to hang out with you or not, as far as emotional attachments go the death of an animal could be the most traumatic thing to happen at a certain point in anyones life

Life by the numbers used to hit me while doing amazing unknown things on a daily basis in the mobile stage, driving home from a 2 month tour thinking this could be the last time, when in reality is there a second time of doing something for the first time? Then you start thinking maybe you should have enjoyed it more, but in the pocket of the moment you never see it that way, riding the wave in to the inevitable shore like the water doesn’t ever end.

I mean come on, we converted a u haul into a mobile stage and followed around the largest metal music festival in America until they put us on it then we doubled down and didn’t even go home then out of sheer timing and not giving a fuck or expecting it got on one of the biggest mtv shows to ever exist while scattering random one off performances that could not even measure up to mayhem and mtv but would define any other bands entire career? I mean the whole fucking thing is and has always been a once in a lifetime opportunity, every single time the Athiarchists ever played one note or drumbeat and called it a show, every single fucking one was and still is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and 2000 fucking shows later, to get your attention, must mention mayhem festival and mtv, to even get the attention of our own fucking home town, it’s sickening. 2000 fucking shows, and all of you motherfuckers are still searching for what’s next, take it from us jack, THERE IS NOTHING NEXT, your most enjoyable time is RIGHT NOW, no matter where it is or what you are doing, otherwise what’s next for you is depression through self imposed failure, the most amazing show the Athiarchists ever played is the next one to happen

4/20/2020 was supposed to be the 15 year anniversary show for The Athiarchists and somewhere around the 2000th show we had played. COVID happened and the show was cancelled, since then we have played a couple one off shows but not any more than about 5–10(see I can’t even remember), in the same time each one of us came closer to dying than at any other point along the way, and not from COVID, from life and random shit any human faces.

What this means is that the chances of us performing 2100 shows or even 2050 shows is actually pretty slim, not trying to be morbid and negative but on top of this even if we did another 100 shows, it only represents 5 percent of all the shows we will ever perform, which is why 50 shows to us seems like nothing but to another band it’s more than they will ever play.

This means The Athiarchists has performed over 95 percent of the shows they will ever perform. At this point whenever you see us play, is possibly the last time you will ever see us play, unless you show up at every show, or are willing to fly to Eugene. Also at this point, unless we turn into a mainstream band, you have already seen your last Athiarchists show, probably over 10 years ago when we were touring the country endlessly. With all the mobile stage stuff we did, it is possible to say that over 1,000,000 people have witnessed at least 1 minute of an Athiarchists show, 100,000 people have watched one entire show, I doubt at this point even 1,000 unique people will see us play ever again. Unless some crazy shit happens which is totally possible because everything is possible, we are going to rage it for 20–30 people in a bar in Eugene with a possible 200–300 person one every once in awhile until the end of our time, which is kind of exactly what we have ever wanted, but we use music differently than the 99 percent of the people that abuse it.

Most bands(especially unsigned) don’t play 2000 shows, so we are in a different category of logic here, your average band even after 15 years could only have 100–200 shows under their belt, so adding another 50–100 is a significant percentage against 100–200 (50 percent) vs 2000 (5 percent)

You’ve got to think about what you are leaving behind, and how you can maximize your impact on the direction the future of music goes. Just think about it, think of all the bands that just vanished no matter how much promise they ever had, working at Wendy’s now talking about how they used to be in a band, by now you can’t even remember their songs, and they were good songs. This is the path of 99 percent of all bands to ever exist, and it’s so unnecessarily sad. Exchange profit right now for enjoyment and immortality later on. Also replace “The Athiarchists” with any other band or whatever it is you are doing in life.

We’re both 40 and past the point of creating a band and doing the grind touring around trying to make a name for ourselves, we got our 10,000 hours in when gas was cheap and two piece bands were an anomaly, on top of this we had many opportunities to sell out to the system over the years and chose not to because we saw how much bullshit came along with it. You want to make it in music? Are you comfortable living like a caged zoo animal? They will all lie to you and pretend it’s the most awesome job in the world, but it’s not, they are full of shit.

There is a reason some of the greatest musicians or artists to ever exist past and present were depressed and on drugs, the world wants you to think it’s a trait common among artistic people and not the obvious failure to achieve any free will through the success of their artistic expression, meaning the grass wasn’t greener, no one should be forced to perform 300 shows a year all over the world of the same production and same set list and same stage banter and same social media posts and same ticket prices and same album selling the same corporate fabricated grift to actual adoring fans at over inflated prices so you can sell an $80 shirt and get $5 to split among your 5 members while all the people in the middle take all this money from your fans under the guise of you(the artist) getting it….but here’s some roadies a weekly stipend and a $4,000,000 tour bus you are liable for paying the lease on, good luck champ

I’m pushing this FUD(fear, uncertainty, doubt) about mainstream artists because you really need to understand that no successful mainstream artist would even consider what I am about to explain about the future of music for the other 99.9 percent of bands that “don’t” make it and “won’t” make it, but at the same time you must believe the life of a mainstream artist should not ever be desired by anyone, the grass ALWAYS looks greener. If you made it mainstream I respect you for it, but if your type of success were for all of us then your paycheck would be way smaller so shut the fuck up and go back to your bus now, it’s bus call, time to go, you need to get some rest, your handler is here, must keep you in tip top shape for the show tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after that, but on the day off we are going to take you all white water rafting! I mean you are going to pay to take the entire production crew whitewater rafting, but it’s needed, for morale

With that being said, our model for the 99.9 percent of other bands should not ever be compared to the mainstream model, because the numbers simply are not there to support everyone being a “famous rockstar” as that seems to be what everyone describes success in music as. The entire structure needs changed, and it has to start by believing more people will listen to your music if it is free, and not free as in a free download, free in every way

There’s two different models for music, you can grind and try to make something of the full commercial copyright model and jump on the Spotify and YouTube paying more royalties bandwagon and pretend you are on a path to being a mainstream band. Or you can take this new approach, a different way of looking at things that I believe will take non mainstream music and catapult it into being the new mainstream while the artists make more and create greater communities than they would with the previous model.

Don’t think of your band as an IP you are building up to control and sell if needed to become bigger than you really ever need to be. Think of it as a vehicle to create tax free revenue at a local bar selling sweet creative merchandise to adoring loyal fans and friends, when they come after you for taxes that means you are big enough to pay them(the government).

Instead of thinking people are stealing your music, think of it as free advertising, ie Spotify is providing a service where anyone in the world can hear your unknown music for free, someone can make a YouTube video and use my unknown music and I will be more known….I can play a show without a cover charge and more people will see me that have never heard me. On another note I truly believe the band Slayer got as big as it did because 90 percent of metal bands cover a slayer song, usually reign in blood(guilty) but you will never see it recorded on an album because that is illegal without paying slayer for it, you will only see it live, but ASCAP is hammering venues for that now as well, oh and go figure, Slayer retired, coincidence? I think not. If slayer allowed bands to record reign in blood it would hold the record for most covered song to ever exist.

Cc0 music

“CC0 is the “no copyright reserved” option in the Creative Commons toolkit — it effectively means relinquishing all copyright and similar rights that you hold in a work and dedicating those rights to the public domain.”

All of it, everything you have ever done, everything you will ever do, call up ASCAP, cancel your account.

Look at what cc0 open source software has done to technology, chances are whatever device you are reading this on was built on top of cc0 software, it basically means people working on one thing together vs multiple greedy companies battling it out wasting money researching the same technology. Once you figure out how to do something, everyone knows how to do something. Who even invented the 1–4–5 chord progression? The person responsible for that is probably not even still alive.

The whole Led Zeppelin/Spirit stairway to heaven theft is a good example, Led Zeppelin “stole” the riff from Sprit, a band that used to open for them, then got so big that everyone in the world believed them because no one knew who spirit was, Led Zeppelin went on to support full commercial copyrights with Richard Branson while in reality they used the cc0 model to start due to using spirits note progression, they just lied about it like everyone else in the world does that has more money or fame than you do, then Richard Branson and that stupid fucking smile on his face bought an island paid for by Spirits riff….nice

Instead of protecting your rights, give them to the world and never worry about it again, they will be protected from any greedy record company or streaming service until the end of time. Your notoriety for the contribution will pay you back in community which will be 10–100x what you would get out of selling it to them. Get 1000 people to donate $100 because you are doing cool shit and giving them free music instead of forcing 10,000 people to pay $10 for the privilege of listening to your music, then at every show you play viciously sell as much reasonably priced merchandise as humanly possible, while pushing the venue to waive any payment to you in exchange for lowering the cover charge if not making the show free, then with the $2000 you just made selling Merch, tip the sound guy $100, tip the bartenders the same and prove to the bar or venue that YOU just brought these people to the show and YOU paid their sound guy and tipped people out and to give the door person a new job as a bar back so they can focus on selling as much alcohol as possible and the band can promote more drinking and the bar can promote going to our Merch booth, then when the bar calls you back in a few weeks wanting your crowd again you tell them 10 percent of sales at the end of the night divided among the bands, no cover charge.

Over the years we have done some cool shit, came up with good ideas and watched as they caught on and other bands used them. Most look at this and think we are being ripped off, but we really always saw it as a humbling thing, which is what it should be. Sure people blatantly rip shit off but most people also do it as a joke or laugh and do it once, why is this not able to be absorbed into YOUR artistic representation without question?

We fucking enjoy playing slayer songs, why do we have to draw the line somewhere and say “that’s too much like slayer”, slayer is done, they will only benefit at this point from any level of band playing their song or recording it in any form, and were not going to fucking pay them for that, they should be paying us if anything, or retire and put their shit in public domain, and walk away, people will still buy their overpriced shirts but you won’t have some 80 year old band member in court suing someone for using shit they wrote 60 years ago, fuck off, and Slayer didn’t even do this so I’m sorry to slayer but if you are slayer and you read this then give us fucking permission to record reign in blood and put it on Spotify, we will gladly split the $0 we’re going to make off of it with you, do you take Venmo?

Sound is sound and I have never understood how you could “patent” a sequence of notes, they are our notes, they are our drum beats, they are our vocals, and when I say our I mean everyone’s, not just the Athiarchists, everyone will always know we are the ones that arranged them that way if they care to dig enough, and if 1,000 people “steal” our music and use it then 1,000 times more people will come to an OG Athiarchists show

Derivatives can chose to contribute to the originating artist community if they want, or they can pretend like they made it up themselves, either way it still works, I’m speaking nft talk here but I say derivatives like someone that listened to it and copied it note for note, or changed a note, doesn’t matter, either way cc0 is cc0.

What’s crazy is some of the most vocal people I know for musicians and their precious “rights” will listen to a Megadeth album with their “rhythm guitar player”, pull out pieces of Megadeth’s copyrighted music to change a little bit and put in their own song then turn around and claim full copyright….go fuck yourself you two sided pricks, it’s not that one person can’t have their cake and eat it too, but when everyone has their cake and eats it, we all run out of cake! And I don’t even like cake, so here you go, Aoki style, and you probably don’t even know what that means because you’re a fucking dinosaur and always will be, get caked

Over the last year while the rest of the world was writing off cryptocurrency and nft’s as “being bad for the environment” or “a Ponzi scheme” we have been out experiencing what I can only describe as a “test matrix in a new world”, it has been the ultimate observation of human nature, Hunter S Thompson or George Carlin would have had a field day with this, and I have been documenting the entire thing in unpublished writings I send to my few closest friends that understand because the 3,000 “friends” I have on Facebook are incapable of understanding the depth of knowledge in understanding the sick sad beast of human nature sitting right in front of our eyes free to witness, it is called web 3

This last year in web 3 has basically been 1,000,000 humans, 10 percent of them pretty much won the lottery right away, generational wealth off a $500 gamble on a 2000px jpg of a cartoon monkey, these people then bought fancy cars and houses which made the other 90 percent jealous and wanting to be like them, so the rich people banded together and basically started manipulating the market, selling access to their information and ideas as if they know how to make generational wealth again. On a daily basis people at the top lose their money, people on the bottom get lucky and make the money the rich people lost, and then you have people like us sitting between the two analyzing human nature

The majority of this money was made on nft’s using the full commercial copyright model, basically if you own this nft, you own the rights to put the picture of it on shirts and sell it at hot topic, or anywhere, this is the way most of the world works. Then mfers came along, wording cc0 in such a way that it caught fire.

Like the Athiarchists rolling up at a mainstream music festival in the mobile stage this picture started popping up in peoples Twitter profiles of a 544px stick figure sitting in a chair smoking a Joint with headphones on and absolutely no use case besides 1 mfer = 1 mfer while being worth over $15,000, their market cap is higher than the band Slipknot at times, there’s 10,000 of them and you can buy one for $15,000 if you want(this may or may not not age well), but the artwork is cc0, meaning you don’t need to buy one, for any reason, ever. You can use the art of the entire collection without even owning one, but for some reason people keep buying the OG mfer. And the OG OG mfer creator Sartoshi is un doxxed(meaning identity is anonymous) and is at 184,000 Twitter followers and counting, joined Twitter April 2021 still doesn’t have approved blue check mark, now try to tell me cc0 doesn’t benefit the original creator? For comparison Jamey Jasta vocalist for the band Hatebreed joined February 2009 and has 160,000 followers, and the coveted blue check mark he has had since 2010

By now though with mfers being cc0 there are thousands of collections of “derivatives”, and millions of individual nft’s based on the original mfer pfp, some look exactly like the original, but when you understand how the blockchain works you will see how owning mfers from contract 0x79FCDEF22feeD20eDDacbB2587640e45491b757f is the same as supporting The Athiarchists after 1000 other bands have called themselves the Athiarchists and played all of our songs. It’s absolutely mind bending I know, but this is what you missed in web 3, humans did this, without government interference or laws or rules, in a pure human nature fashion, and to someone like me, a non violent anarchist, it brought tears to my eyes to be able to see cc0 play out this fashion, it’s what I have been looking for my entire life. It is everything The Athiarchists ever did. And it is now officially too late for you to see this example in web 3

The government is coming in, just about every branch of it, regulating things, and you just missed the greatest show you would have ever seen in your lifetime because you followed some FUD Business Insider fed you on Facebook. Now wipe those tears with some of these $100 bills i made while watching this go down(take it easy there’s only 6 of them) and use the results of this test to see what cc0 is capable of when applied to the rest of the world, because it’s coming, it’s inevitable, get on the train early, help define the future of music

First thing people will say is they have to make money somehow, just realize the amount of money you make selling Merch and even your own music that anyone can now get for free due to cc0, but it’s limited edition straight from you at a live show or from your website, you can still sell cds and I assure you will make more money than fighting Spotify for even 500 percent more per stream, give in, look at it as free advertising, same goes for YouTube, anytime someone wants to use our music it’s an endless stream of contracts to use a song from us(a band that doesn’t care to get paid and the songs are literally downloadable from our website), we have even had our own songs removed from our own YouTube videos due to copyright infringements, upon ourselves? If it were more free and easy for people to use music then so many more unknown bands would have their music out there in big name videos getting free advertising, instead of thinking Lexus owes you $10,000 for your song on a commercial, think you didn’t have to pay Lexus $50,000 to advertise your unknown song and band, because that is exactly how Facebook and Instagram operate.

With any luck places like Facebook and YouTube can spare you some of the creepy advertising and let you contact your fans for free when they won’t have to spend so much on an entire department dedicated to figuring out how to send $0.0001 per stream to john smith of “morbid human chaos” every 3 weeks when someone tries to listen to their hit single anywhere on the internet

Think about limp bizkit covering faith, or any of the other major covers that almost launched artists careers. Why is this reserved for the people with enough money to pay for the rights to do any of it, yeah you are playing a song someone else wrote, but it is your own style, your own way, the first time I heard faith was from limp bizkit, I didn’t hear the original for another 10 years, but I respect the original more because limp bizkit did what they did, no matter how big the original artist was, it still helped them, thinking of this large scale with cc0 the possibilities are endless

When people die or a band breaks up no matter what they accomplish in life or music usually dies with them. It’s sad to think, but that’s the way it goes. Michael Jackson is a great example, one of the greatest artists in music history dies over 10 years ago, and since all his music is so valuable and owned by other people, the bar is so high to cover that music or even listen to it, that the music died with the artist.

Fuck that shit

One of the biggest worries in life is if you will make an impact on this world, at least that’s what I think most peoples primal urge is, to make a lasting difference, good or bad. Or a band breaking up can be the same as “death”. So no matter how large or small your band is, make a contribution, you’ve spent all this time living and now it’s time for a piece of you to live forever, because if you’re anything like me then you know the life span of any artist is far shorter than a normal human, same goes for bands. So fuck it, you’re not going to make it in the mainstream, and you’re not going to live forever, take our word for it as The Athiarchists, you don’t want to make it in the main stream, time to dig our own ditch to divert some of this water, and we need more than just two shovels

What’s great about this is that were not asking anyone else to do the same thing, do what you want, however you want to do it, watch what we do, see how it works, believe in cc0, or don’t, but if you hate this concept in any way while also protecting the “rights” of your music then you have proven that you are scared that this model might actually work and you will never get that moment in life sitting at the desk on the top floor of Capitol Records singing away your artistic creativity in exchange for popularity, stick with your gut feeling and not the voice in your head telling you that you must follow the same roadmap as a top 100 world famous rockstar

Look up the song Linoleum from NOFX, then watch the video for Linewleum, it’s just about everything I just described playing out right in front of you and has been for years, over 7,000 bands have covered this song and NOFX has not fucked with a single one of them, instead they put out a video with 100 bands covering their song over the music of NOFX and Avenged Sevenfold performing it live, in looking at this in 2022 it just blows my mind, NOFX was and still is one of my favorites, but in the face of cc0 music and the true definition of the word “punk”, they are pioneers

We don’t need you, but your contribution to cc0 no matter what it is, no matter how large or small, collectively, with everything else, will eventually create something unstoppable by any force, that is until it actually works and the government pulls some bullshit as per scheduled destruction of anything that becomes powerful, but that means we won, and who is we, that my friend, is up to you to decide, I thought we were supposed to be the people, so what kind of person are you

No one is in control of cc0, I didn’t ask permission of the cc0 community to write this because there is no official cc0 community, there is no ASCAP for cc0, but there needs to be a way of searching and seeing what all is in cc0, I don’t know what all is out there but there definitely needs to be a “Wikipedia” of cc0, and anything above publishing text requires bandwidth and a model to pay for it, and I believe it can be figured out and done right in a non profit fashion

If you plant trees in containers they will only get so big, even if you put them in huge pots the size of a forest they will only get so big, so long as they are the only tree. I’m not going to get into the shit that goes on underground with the roots because it’s so insane and magnificent that I will leave it up to someone who understands it better, but trees and plants thriving in a forest growing together sharing the same dirt and nutrients and mycelium freeways is such a fucking work of art, people look at it and say “LOOK WHAT GOD DID!” and I say “look what cc0 did”, am I right? It is literally cc0 forest plants vs container plants that don’t share things and live in their own sterile environments, so fuck you if everything isn’t connected, come grow in the cc0 forest