Quit Wasting Your Time Complaining About Streaming Revenue!
The final mix has just been emailed through for your first release. Suddenly this dream of becoming a serious artist is as real as it’s ever going to be. You’re 3/4 of the way through your marketing plan, the hype is building and everyone can’t wait to hear the finished product. Now all that’s left to do is upload your music somewhere for the masses to purchase / play.
You upload your music to Spotify, all of your fans pre-save and the launch goes really well for how big you are. You’ve received 20’000 plays in the first week.
Its a month later now you’ve already moved onto the next project. In that time you’ve taken those plays as a sign your onto something. You figure you can spend an extra $500-1000 on some new gear because you know “I got all those plays” and that streaming revenue will be coming in.
Then you check your pay pal and see $87.40 as a credit and wonder what thats from. You look closer and its your distro company. Quickly you write up an email asking “wheres the rest of it?!”. To which they respond you have received all of it.
Now all of that bravado and energy you were riding off that has helped you spend countless sleepless nights over the last month making the next 3-4 tracks is fading. Doing some quick calculations you realise that you would need roughly 500k-1 million streams a month to receive enough to get by.
The question is now not how will I reach those heights it’s how will I survive in the mean time.
So you turn to social media and write a status along the lines of “Man, Fuck (insert streaming business)…they can’t even pay artists a fraction of what we deserve!”.
In truth though how much do you feel you deserve to be paid for 1 click?
1 click that counts whether its you clicking on it or a fan.
In the end they are a business that needs to make money and needs to compete at the highest level. Yes you are enabling it to do that by uploading music to it. But you alone are not the reason people use the service.
Think of the last 10 tracks you listened to on the service. A playlist most likely heavy with charting tracks.
A lot of these have been actively sourced by the company and have deals running with their labels etc to make sure these are uploaded.
To then keep themselves in a position to acquire popular artists, which hopefully leads to more users sign up to use the service is an extremely expensive process. This continues to make these companies operate at a loss. Spotify in particular only recently recorded the third time its ever profited in a quarter at the end of 2019.
GET TO THE POINT
This leads me to my point, if what you get paid by a streaming service per play bothers you why waste your time doing it? Discovery is terrible unless you are great at getting playlisted or pay someone on the inside. You are really just helping that service grab more of a choke hold on users by sending your fans to their service.
Here is a groundbreaking statement. You don’t have to upload your tracks to streaming services!
If you have a core fan base, send them to your website. 2 things happen.
Using a simple service like Shopify you can receive 100% (minus fees) of all proceeds.
If you setup your website properly you can also re target an audience that is actively interested in your music.
As an added bonus you can have other items available on your website that they wouldn’t normally be able to find on a streaming service. Tickets to your next gig, limited edition merch etc.
All of a sudden that one stream on Spotify that earned you that 0.006 cents turns into an album and a TShirt pack for $27.50. Now you have a fan both listening to your music and repping your brand.
Setting up a website is not really your thing?
Don’t stress places like BANDCAMP and PATREON exist.
Bandcamp - Discover amazing new music and directly support the artists who make it. (‘The rise and rise of bandcamp’)
i.e. the fan buys music directly from their fav artist rather then paying every entity on the way down.
Fans have paid artists $514 million using Bandcamp, and $22.5 million in the last 30 days alone.
Patreon - You can let your fans become active participants in the work they love by offering them a monthly membership.
i.e. They pay a monthly subscription to basically fund your upcoming projects. Then they get first access to that and anything else you want to give them for their subscription.
These 2 services and more exist on the internet and are super user friendly. Fully dedicated to providing the artist and end user with a great experience and keeping the money where it should be.
So now why aren’t you getting to work building these up rather then just sending people yet another streaming service.
CONCLUSION
I personally have nothing against streaming. I see them as the radio of the now. The second I could have OTT television and didn’t have to watch an ad I never watched another second of Free to Air television. It went the same for music, now I don’t have to listen to ads and can just listen to the music I want, it’s bliss.
I wrote this blog to open up the conversation on the real possibilities around building a solid fan base for yourself as an artist instead of a streaming service. You send someone to Spotify they hear your song then it skips to the next song randomly. That can’t be good for your brand.
However if you send them to your website. They are now listening to only your music and also viewing your branding / marketing. If they’re true fans then sending them to stream or to your website will not matter.
Just because your friend down the road had 10k streams on his latest release doesn’t mean a thing. They just made a cool $60.
Instead you sent them to your website and you just sold 30 singles an album and 4 t-shirts. 30% of them signed up to your text database and your building an audience you can use to re target via facebook and instagram.
Best thing is you can still upload to streaming services as well. It’s a win win. Just quit complaining about what they pay when you can go out and earn the real money yourself with a little bit of work.