General Archive - Nadine de Macedo

Flawed Theorem – A brand-new music project

Nadine — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Now it’s official: together with Christopher, I’m launching the online band “Flawed Theorem”. How it all came about, and what we’ll be releasing soon, you can read up here. If you have been following my website or music profiles for a while, you might have come across Christopher Matthew Smith before. On my album “Going My Way”, we recorded “At your command”, an epic prog rock track with numerous time signature changes. Over the following years, we created many more songs ranging between alternative rock, progressive rock, and metal. All of them felt cohesive, like they belonged together. We held them back, thinking they might work for an album. Last summer, we finally met in person and decided not just to make an album, but to form a band. It took us several months to come up with a band name, and then things moved pretty quickly: logo design, social media channels, mastering songs and searching for artwork. Flawed Theorem is now officially the progressive rock / metal band formed by Christopher and me. Alongside composition, arrangement, and production, I will also play synthesizers and guitar. Christopher will be writing lyrics and providing vocals on all tracks. If you’re into Tool, System of a Down, Opeth, or Katatonia, you might enjoy our song. Other influences include Coheed and Cambria, Led Zeppelin, and Pearl Jam. Since I currently have to take a break from making music, we decided two weeks ago to finally go public with the project. We would really appreciate your support, so feel free to drop a like, follow, or comment on our profiles: https://www.facebook.com/flawedtheoremhttps://www.instagram.com/flawedtheoremhttps://open.spotify.com/intl-de/artist/3aOJWxo4UujSzJ3DLHyJvehttps://soundcloud.com/flawedtheoremhttps://flawedtheorem.bandcamp.com You can already pre-save our debut single “Petals”. As a nice side effect, you will also be able to follow our brand-new profiles on streaming platforms. They are currently set private, so we cannot forward links.

This post Flawed Theorem – A brand-new music project was published at Nadine de Macedo.

Happy New Year

Nadine — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:00:00 +0000

I wish you a happy new year and a lot of creativity, success and health. This year is all about getting stuff done. Instead of writing new songs, I want to finish as many projects as possible.

This post Happy New Year was published at Nadine de Macedo.

2025 – Expanding the Universe

Nadine — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:00:00 +0000

Another year flew by so quickly – and it has been one of my busiest. While I made significant strides in growing my audience and navigating the music business, I faced a major setback in my creativity. Here is my annual recap for 2025! A year in review All songs that I published in 2025 My musical output this year has been extremely versatile and wild. Who could have guessed that I jump from deep house to metal to gospel? “Caoineag” and “Fading Light” have been written and produced within a few days. “Nocturnal“, “Aeronaut“, “Midnight” and “Nightfall” are singles from the album “Nightflight” which have been written in 2004 but were on hiatus for 20 years (more below). “Dystopia – Remixed” consists of electronic remixes by The Primary Phase Principle and The English Assassin, because the original song has been from 2007. All other songs were written many months and sometimes years ago, but took some time to find the right collaborator and mood. In this annual recap, I cannot say what has been my favourite collab, but I was in the mood for metal, and super happy that we created and finished some songs. “Embrace the Storm” and “Backwards” were very well received by the audience, while the lyrics of “Into the Abyss” and “Beneath the Shell” became deeply personal. Last but not least, there was some adult pop music again with “Auf Wiedersehen“, “Carry Me Home“, and “Isn’t It Haunting?“. Big hugs and thanks to everyone I collaborated with. It was an honour to work with you. Nightflight – A lost album from 2004 In November 2024, I found a floppy disk with a dozen MIDIs drafts of an unpublished album. I considered it to be a good idea to turn these drafts into full production, but I completely underestimated the emotional weight. It is hard to produce a genre you don’t enjoy and listen to any more, and it took me months to step back and say: You’ve done it – it’s great – never again. My album “Nightflight” was well received, and streaming quite a lot on YouTube. My Bandcamp listening party felt like a milestone, and I never thought the songs would pass 500 plays on both YouTube and Spotify. While it’s clear people still enjoy old-school electro, I had to decline the many collaboration requests, as I’ve made the decision to step away from electronic dance music. Your Remixes In this annual recap, I realized I’ve been so focused on releasing and re-releasing songs that I had no time to create any new remixes myself. Fortunately, I received some fantastic remixes from other artists – tracks that deserve more plays. Below is a list with links to each platform. Please stream them and support these talented creators! There are still some remixes in work. If you want to remix something, just contact me, and I can see what we can do. I will not be able to publish your remix as a single, but I might compile another remix album in 2027. Some songs are not re-released yet, so there is a small chance to become part of the official release, that will be dated back to the original release date. Go Streaming! As some of you may know, I was never a big fan of music streaming. I still collect CDs, and if it’s not possible, I buy high quality files from Bandcamp or Amazon. But as my social-media audience grew, so did the demand to put my music on streaming platforms. So I gave in and spent the last 1.5 years planning how to bring my large YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp catalogue to Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, and more. With help from a few friends, I tested several distributors and finally found an affordable option that also lets me properly credit collaborators. It has been a huge amount of work: remastering old tracks, creating missing artwork, and cleaning up metadata. By the end of this year, I manage to move everything up to 2021. Only four albums remain, that are scheduled for next year. Late summer, the first results appeared. I was added to indie playlists worldwide, received over 40 radio plays, and reached 50,000 streams. I still invest more time and money than I get back, but I’ve reached a completely new audience. Last year I had about 30 superfans; now there’s a core group of around 100 listeners across Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Pandora, plus a larger group of 200–500 occasional listeners. While the comments on YouTube and SoundCloud significantly decreased, I was able to get airplays in Australia, Canada and Belgium – That’s a big win! The results exceeded my expectations. My only wish is that some more people comment on SoundCloud and YouTube, because these platforms enhance direct communication. If you plan to leave Spotify, please consider streaming my music on Qobuz, Apple, Amazon or Deezer – I could definitely need some listeners and playlists there. Bandcamp Subscription Another big topic this year has been the Bandcamp subscription. Two things motivated me to use Bandcamp as a fan service platform. First, distributing and hosting my songs costs way more money that I’m making – second, Bandcamp does not offer a technical solution for big discographies and multi-collaborations (more over here). For an annual fee, subscribers get my singles as soon as they’re published, plus some b-sides and unpublished remixes. I am happy to announce that two of my biggest costs are covered, with a few more, I can fully break even. Thanks again for your support! Supporting indie music with Mitxoda I am sorry to say, that producing and publishing music became too easy. The market is flooded with AI generated slop, and I have a hard time finding new artists worth listening and supporting. This year I teamed up with the Belgian artist Mitxoda, who is running the “Mitxoda Weekly” indie music newsletter, and also a French radio show called “Le Salon de Mitxoda” running every Friday 4pm CEST. If you want to listen to some great music that doesn’t have thousands of plays, this is your way to go. Every week I recommend one artist who writes superb music and would get lost in the sea of releases. I will have a break for a few weeks, but I will be back soon with new recommendations. If you love music as much as I do, please spend your time listening to independent artists. We don’t get support by the industry. There is no service, sponsor or label that helps us with recording, artwork, promotion, playlists, radio shows or booking. Indie artists do everything on our own, and many of us pay subscriptions to make their music available. In times, where 100,000 songs are published every day, and 1000 streams to get 1 USD, any kind of support is helpful. Go to concerts, buy merch, use Bandcamp Fridays, put us into a playlist among your favourite bands, drop a comment. Many artists are struggling, because they do not only compete against fellow artists, but also against AI. In my humble opinion, being 1 of 1000 active listeners means more than being 1 of 1,000,000 people who stream the top 40. Don’t forget, even your idols started small. Statistics No big song statistics this year – I’m still migrating my discography, so it’s hard to keep track what happened where. For now, I can just say that “Embrace the Storm“, “Backwards” and “Caoineag” have been your favourites from this year. All three songs got more than 1200 streams on Spotify and reached more than 250 clicks on YouTube and SoundCloud both. “Isn’t It Haunting?” was not part of the statistics any more, but it’s also taking a huge leap forward! Thanks to everybody who listened and shared my music! Preview to 2026! Hitting the wall – part III As mentioned above in this annual recap, being an indie artist is a constant struggle with social media and streaming services. But now AI entered the place and made creative life even more ridiculous. What is the point in creating music and art, when some people prompt something mediocre within a minute? A survey recently said that 97% of all people can’t tell human art from AI art. The fight against technology demands all willpower and stamina. As somebody who started their journey more than 20 years ago, learned instruments and signal theory, I can’t just stop here. I will continue making music, but I’m currently not in the mood for it. If you read the annual recap from the very beginning, you might see that I am busy with re-releases and paperwork. But I also counted more than a dozen half recorded songs that we wrote in the last five years. In this particular situation, it is pointless to think about collaboration and songwriting. My aim for 2026 is to finish off this pile, even if it means that I will not release a new album. It is better to compile these when it’s clear what finishes and what doesn’t. I may update my collaboration list when some instrumentals finished so we can get them done and published next year. It’s possible that multiple albums drop in 2027, as I may know which songs could be used. Big secret plans for next year? While taking a break from songwriting and production both, there is a huge project running in the background for quite some months. What will it be?! Wild guesses are welcome! Thanks for your support Once again in this annual recap, I would like to support everybody who streamed my music, read and interacted with my social media channels, aired my music on the radio, added it to playlist, helped me with artwork and photography, found the right words at the right time or simply appeared. The biggest thanks go to my collaborators and subscribers. Without you all this would have never happened!

This post 2025 – Expanding the Universe was published at Nadine de Macedo.

Merry Christmas

Nadine — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:00:00 +0000

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you so much for your comments, streams, feedback, and questions. I’m looking forward to an exciting new year!

This post Merry Christmas was published at Nadine de Macedo.

I started a Bandcamp Subscription

Nadine — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 16:50:32 +0000

Happy New Year, everybody! After 20 years of music, I decided to expand my reach by placing my discography onto different platforms. Joining my Bandcamp subscription supports a sustainable ecosystem for indie music, and also helps me to pay annual expenses for distribution. I will offer most of my singles and remixes as high quality downloads and for streaming. The problem of music streaming When talking about music streaming, most people rely on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music. Of course, mainstream platforms offer a huge amount of songs and artists, but their revenue is minuscule. In average, 1000 streams of a song pay 2-3 USD – and most indie artists don’t even reach 1000 streams on one song. They pay for distributors and playlist promoters, though it’s pointless to compete against a huge amount of fake artists and AI generated music. In the end, artists do a lot of work and get nothing. As streaming platforms are the new normal, I’m working hard on getting my music there. I don’t do music for the money, but I want to have a reach. Besides having serious problems of finding a distributor that can handle my extreme amount of collabs and songs, we encounter several technical difficulties. We’re running tests since May 2024 – Now it’s January 2025, and we don’t have a result yet. If we succeed, I’ll end up with annual expenses just to be on streaming platforms. If we don’t – there’s still no place to download our singles. Why regular Bandcamp doesn’t work There is a much better way to support indie artists most people don’t know about: Bandcamp. Besides of offering high quality downloads and sharing 70-85% of their revenue with artists, streams are reported to music collection societies and chart reporting systems. That said, Bandcamp is not only an online shop, but also a different ecosystem that pays a fairer revenue for musicians. I always wanted to have my discography on Bandcamp, but I did not find a good way to handle it. My discography is huge. The more songs you upload onto Bandcamp, the slower the site, and there’s no way to filter or sort. After some long thoughts, I came to the idea of offering my albums on the regular Bandcamp site and the singles and remixes as annual subscription. This would keep my Bandcamp site fast and neat, while helping me to pay for the annual expenses to get my music on streaming platforms. What does a Bandcamp subscription mean? Similar to Patreon or Steady, you pay 25 EUR (equals 25 USD) per year to access all singles and EPs under the subscription tier. These will be included into your stash, so you can download them or stream them everywhere and anytime you want. I decided for an annual model, because Bandcamp and the payment provider already take a cut of 15-20%. Setting everything up is quite a tough amount of work including remastering, designing covers and correcting metadata. Please understand that I can’t do that in a few days – it will take months. My Bandcamp subscription offers: If you support me with a Bandcamp subscription you get my music for a lower price than on any other platform, make sure that the money reaches the artists directly AND support me to get my stuff on streaming platforms. Already 4 subscriptions help me to break even. Important: The Bandcamp Subscription is a service from Bandcamp. Their terms and conditions apply. Of course, most of my music is still accessible without subscription. You can download my albums on Bandcamp without being a subscriber. My YouTube channel continues the same way, and my SoundCloud offers the last 10–20 songs (and the published material, if possible). However, Bandcamp is the only place where you can download unpublished material and remixes.

This post I started a Bandcamp Subscription was published at Nadine de Macedo.