About
About Rainhat
Rainhat is an independent project, not tied to any record labels or publishers. I do pretty much everything myself. I made this website, I run the business aspect, I handle the writing and recording of the music, and I play all the instruments in the recordings myself. It’s a lot of work, but it also means that I get to decide what happens, when and how, every step of the way. Like the decision to license all my music through Creative Commons, for example.
I want my music to be available to my fans, legally and unconditionally. A musician is nothing without fans, but many bands seem to go out of their way to make it as hard as possible for their fans to actually hear their music. It’s all about the money, and that never made much sense to me. Obviously, I need money to be able to keep doing this, just like any musician, but I don’t want to make money on the expense of everything else. So therefore all my music is free. You download it, and if you like it, you can share it with your friends. That way my music reaches more people than it could otherwise. Some of those people will like what they hear, and share it with their friends. I reach a wider audience, which means more people will come see me in concert, and I will make more money that way. If I insisted on charging money for each time someone wants to listen to my songs, I might get more money for downloads, but less people would want to pay money for listening to music, so less people would know about me, and I would just make less money, period. So there you have it.
Rainhat is also a kind of social experiment, and you, my dear reader, are a big part of it. Since I do all the marketing and publishing online, this means that I rely a great deal on the internet for succeeding. My fans are perhaps more important to me than fans are to many other bands and musicians. Apart from writing music that anyone would actually want to listen to, I literally make it or break it with the help of you guys. You can help me out a lot, and very easily. All you have to do is check out my music, and if you like it, share it with people or spread the word about me in person, on twitter, facebook, delicious, digg… Any way you want. The more people do this, the more people will hear my music and maybe become fans. The more fans I have, the more shows I can do, and I can keep doing what I love: music.
If you want, you can also support me with a donation. Any money I receive will be used for the maintenance of this site, for paying rent and for buying food.
About Sami Ylinen
I grew up in Timrå, Sweden, a place where hockey and horse racing is pretty much all there is. I was the odd duck out, since I didn’t like horse racing and didn’t care much for hockey. I was really interested in music instead, ever since I got a little toy mandolin for christmas when I was about 2 years old.
I’ve been writing songs since I was about 13, although I would rather swim among sharks than show anyone those first attempts at songwriting. I started taking music lessons when I was 10, and played in a couple of different bands doing rock, pop and folk music. Later, I went to college to study classical music, and as a good music nerd, I worked my way to a M.Mus in performance.
I worked a bit as a freelance musician in orchestras and such, but soon got a bit fed up with that sort of work. It was time for a change of scenery and some variation. So I moved to Canada and started working as a video game tester. That was amazingly different from classical music. I did that for a couple of years, but there was only so much non-creativity I could take, so I soon started gravitating back towards music again. I bought some microphones and a Tascam porta-studio and started writing more songs and recording them. At first it was mostly for fun, but I soon realized that I really liked doing it, and that I could probably get some fairly decent results if I got a few more gadgets and put some effort into it. I started taking guitar lessons and writing songs more seriously. After two and a half years in Canada, I quit my job, returned to Sweden and started Rainhat with the intent of becoming an international superstar.
So far so good. 
