sez:

"OK you bastards, you win...and here is what you've won:

Free music

and

My retirement from recording new albums."

"Gee, John Ludi (whoever the hell you are), why is this"?

I got a few major reasons:

• I DIDN'T "CHANGE THE WORLD":  My mission as an artist of conscience is largely over.  For 30 years I have tried to make a difference in the world and I really haven't accomplished squat, despite devoting myself heart, mind, body and soul to the task.  For 25 of those long and difficult years I tried to send a message that basically said "change your ways or you will be really unhappy about the results of your collective actions".  That didn't work at all, even amongst most of the people I've known personally, so for the past 5 years I have tried to send the basic message "prepare for the inevitable consequences of all of those actions I was warning you about the previous 25 years".  That didn't work either.  Now it's too late.  It does not make sense to warn people about something that has already happened. Currently, our civilization is at the beginning stages of collapse: it's too late to stop it, and it's too late for the unprepared to cope.  If you are not mentally and emotionally (as well as physically and materially) prepared to deal with abrupt and unpleasant change, you are going to die starving.  Too bad, little monkey-thing.  As for myself, I think my job as an artist here on Earth is mostly done.   I could be wrong, but I doubt it.  You reach a point where you realize that it is best to just shut up if no one is listening.  I have reached that point.   From here on out I may play some acoustic gigs just for fun (before the grid collapses), but the time and effort involved in trying to make music of an exceptional quality level is too excessive for the nominal impact it has had in the world.  Let humanity end its days as an organized global civilization listening to content-free crap by an endless parade of 18 year old blond whores with silicone implants who can't sing without the use of digital pitch correction...it really does not matter anymore.  The Great Global Reset Button is being pressed and there will be those who live and those who die...and only our future history will be able to tell us which of those 2 groups is the better off...if there is anyone literate left to write that future history.
   
• DIGITAL PIRACY:  Despite my mounting misanthropy and cynicism, hope does seem to spring eternal in my slowly hardening heart: I rather foolishly thought that some of hundreds of thousands of people who had been downloading my songs for free off of this site over the past few years might actually BUY my new projects.  Nope.  Of the 2 albums I put out last year, the Quiet Earth Orchestra album was the one that made a small splash and racked up an initial promising amount of sales on CDBaby (sadly, the Soft War album went nowhere despite sending out a ton of promo, and I personally think that it is the better of the 2 albums from an execution standpoint).  I was greatly encouraged by those initial sales...but then something interesting happened: the sales stopped abruptly and I was able to find the entire album on Torrent sites as a free download at about the same time.  Isn't that nice?  I spend YEARS putting an album together that has quality music and thoughtful lyrics, spending hours and hours and hours perfecting the album to the best of my abilities, just to have people rip me off for the effort?  LISTEN IDIOTS:  If you rip off an Elton John album he is probably not going to give a crap...he is a fat old rich man in a mansion and won't miss the sales...but if you steal from independent and unsigned artists you may destroy what little incentive there is for us to keep making music "for the people".  Every single album we sell makes a difference to us, believe me.  If artists can't even HOPE to just break even on our projects, there will come a time when sharing our work with the public will become too expensive to sustain...and all you will be left with is crap music whose only virtue is that it has financial backing behind it or crap music by artists whose ambition to be famous far outweighs their talent.  Oh wait...it's already like that now?  Oh well, too late.
   
• ROCK IS DEAD:  The time of really "quality" rock music is over: The era from the 60's to the 80's where brilliant and interesting people made brilliant and interesting albums.  The music industry and the general dumbing-down of this plastic and hyper-materialistic culture has killed creativity and passion stone cold dead.  I can't believe the crap people willingly listen to these days.  It's like someone urinating in your ears.  Vapid dribble would be a compliment.  When the most popular rock band out there is frigging Fall Out Boy, it's time to stick a fork in it.  The lack of originality out there is breathtaking.  Everyone is a pale memory of a weak replica of a poor imitation of a half-baked clone. The era of idiosyncratic artists on a mission to change the world has passed into history...and now all that is left is pap, illiterate Rap/Hip-Hop, cartoon darkness, fake sensitivity, sophomoric lyrics, banal sensationalism, and tepid retreads of far better music created by far better musicians.  And that means that MY time is over, because I refuse to make crap music for a crap audience.  I'd rather take a bullet.  As it stands, the people who used to listen to good music are all well past the age where they have stopped seeking out new artists and new music, and the younger people (Generation "Whine") wouldn't know a decent song if it crawled up their asses and laid eggs.  Let them eat Beyonce.
   
• I'M TIRED:  Really f**king tired.  Recording just takes way too much of my vital energy for the lack of reward I get.  I can't continue working in my professional career during the day (often working around 60 hours a week) and recording and promoting albums at night...it is just too much.  Something has to give, and it's the recording.  (As far as my own personal future plans are concerned, I recently bought some rural land in the middle of nowhere.  On it I will build an eco-friendly dwelling like a yurt and live off of the grid.  At some point I will bail out of society entirely and spend the rest of my days reading, growing food, and meditating.
  
  
• MY SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT:  Since I first became aware of the universal fact of physical mortality, I have been asking myself the big question: what remains? All this time I have held to the hypothesis that if anything does continues beyond this mortal coil, it is the level of consiousness that one has developed. Dealing with the darkness of human experience and human civilization and human history is a road that can lead you into that very darkness itself. At some point you start to become what you warn people about, what you fight against. This has been progressively happening to ME over the past several years, to the point where I have become the bitter and angry and resentful person that I have never wanted to be. Prior to the past few years I was always able to maintain a sense of universal perspective, ironic detachment and even a level of humor about the human condition and where it is taking the species. I have lost that ability of late and I need to get it back. When it comes time for me to take my leave of this physical plain of existence, I don't want to leave it as a dark spirit. I have lost my sense of compassion and it has diminished me. I could never be one of those oblivious New Age types who ignores the shadow side and sings about unicorns and rainbows, to be that inauthentic would be an even greater crime against "Spirit"...but I can't keep exposing the down side of the human psyche and human endeavor anymore without it plunging me into a pit of hopelessness that I may not ever be able to climb back out of.
   

So now that I have made you feel all warm and fuzzy, here's the deal:

I am now making all of my current albums “donation-ware”. 

Meaning this:  you can download these albums as a zipped collection of MP3s encoded at 192kbps for your own enjoyment…and you may copy THE ENTIRE ZIP FILE (including notes) and share it with friends or whatnot, but there are a few things that I require in exchange.  One is in the form of a gentle request, the other two are in the form of a legal demand.

• THE REQUEST:  If you like these albums, please donate something to my PayPal fund.  If I receive sufficient donations for my previous efforts I might be moved to come out of retirement and record more material (probably when pigs fly in a frozen hell)…but as all of my previous albums have not come near to breaking even in terms of direct expense (let alone time expense) and people have been posting them to torrent sites, I see no reward in spending copious amounts of time and money to release more albums.   Enjoy the free music, but know that if you do not encourage me to make more via a donation (however small), you will have discouraged yet one more creative independent artist to give up their artistic career in favor of non-creative activities that keep food on the table.  You may enjoy listening to nothing but an endless parade of unmitigated rodent puke like Akon during these last few years of our current civilization.  (If you do show that you are indeed a thoughtful and caring individual by donating to this fund, please leave a note that will tell me what album(s) you liked the most…that way I can focus on that type of project if I ever decide to record again.)
   

• DEMAND 1:  Unless you have a direct license agreement with me, YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF MY EFFORTS.  If I find that you are doing so without my consent (or unless you are an authorized affiliate of CDBaby or a music seller I have an agreement with), I will sue you.   I will find you, and I will sue you.  This is not a joke.   I have the financial means to make you my legal bitch and I will enjoy doing so.
   

• DEMAND 2:  You do not alter the songs or the attached tags IN ANY WAY, unless it for your own private consumption.  The songs contain tags which have this website address in them...please leave it there if you pass these songs or albums on to your friends (or enemies).

If you can live with these types of covenants, feel free to download my albums and share them.  At least 3 or 4 of them are world class projects that I am highly proud of...the rest are decent enough for public consumption, and the ones that are not on here need work done that I don't have the time or inclination to do. 

I'd like to think that I am a better person for having made these albums, even though it would have been more in my self interest to have spend the past 30 years being a money-worshipping pig-whore like most people in our culture have been, ever since the 60's flower-children sold every last ideal they had for a house in the suburbs and a 401k (and I am ever-so-amused to watch most of them now lose both). 

If you require more information before you invest your oh-so-precious time and effort in pressing a couple buttons on a mouse to download my music for free, the first two albums on the list have their own websites, and the rest have their own pages.  In addition, the zipped files also have liner notes and lyrics (where I had the time to put them together), as well as a jpg file of the cover art.

I hope you enjoy them and get something out of them.

I wish the best of you the best, and the rest of you the rest.
 

Hey you!!!
Drop the Entitlement Mentality long enough to donate something to this Paypal fund: 

FREE DOWNLOADABLE ALBUMS: