I'm keeping the music off Spotify

Every artist does the same thing with a finished song. Upload it to the big platforms and wait for a machine to decide who hears it. Fractions of a cent a play. Your work dropped into the same pile as everything else anyone ever uploaded, found only when the algorithm feels generous.

I made a few hundred songs this year. I'm not sending them there.

They go on the radio instead. My radio. The only place they live.

A station, not a catalog

GZS Radio runs around the clock now, and it runs like a real station instead of a shuffle button. Mornings open slow, coffee and quiet. The afternoon drifts down to the Malecón, the Cuban stuff, then into blues and dust and back roads. Late night turns mean. The dead hours fill with drone and tape hiss and numbers nobody's meant to understand.

A voice slips in between the songs to tell you where you are. Low, unbothered, a little too calm.

It never goes silent. There's enough music here to run for years, and the empty hours are holding a seat for live shows that haven't started yet.

Free to hear, yours to own

The broadcast costs nothing. It always will. That part is the open door, and the door stays open.

The recordings are the thing you buy. The clean master, dragged out of the static and handed over, yours to keep and carry anywhere you go. You won't find it on the platforms, because it was never there. There's one place to own it, and that's the whole idea.

The broadcast is free. The master is yours. No one stands in the middle.

Scarcity used to be an accident of vinyl and shelf space. Now it's a decision, and I'm making it on purpose. The signal stays home. Whatever it turns out to be worth stays home with it.

It isn't done. The live mics are cold, the store's still warming up, half the shows will get torn down and rebuilt by next week. But the station's on the air tonight, and it only plays here.