one of the first blog posts i ever made was about the status of connecticut for touring bands. the article i referenced in that post is important to me: it was one of the big reasons i decided to start ctverses.com. this blog felt like something i could do to provide back to the musicians and artists who had littered my life with joy, happiness, and empathy with their music! and now i feel compelled to return back to those thoughts because local blogger MyEmuIsEmo has recently written a fantastic piece about streaming and how artists are compensated for your listens. check it out! no seriously: stop reading this very sentence and go read it.
ok, did you finish reading it? i’ll trust that you did, and you wouldn’t lie to a friendly mutt like me on the internet?
so it’s a pretty depressing story, and one that isn’t totally unfamiliar to most of us. we know that streaming doesn’t pay well. we’ve heard that spotify (and apple music, et al.) pay fractions of pennies for streaming, but it is startling to see the numbers in black and white like that. for me, it is easy for the cognitive dissonance to settle in: “well, i use spotify a lot, but i also buy a lot of music too, so it’s okay.” that’s the reasoning i would use to sleep at night. so just to summarize, assuming you use apple music or spotify (like the majority of streaming users), the artists you love make about $1 for every 200 – 300 streams.
we are at a point where most artists don’t expect to make a living off of their art. i’d at least like for them to not fall into a money pit trying to create art at a modest budget. major record labels and silicon valley have conspired to give customers’ an unbeatable bargain: all the music you could want for virtually free. the person picking up the check, though, is the artist creating the music.
before i keep talking — because ultimately i want to frame this as “how can you best support your favorite local musician” — i want to talk specifically about bands operating outside of the major label system. once you bring in a record label, the accounting can get messy, especially the bigger the label. for these purposes, i want you to think about your favorite independent artist.
what’s the streaming count of this artist on spotify? i’m going to single a band out: waveform*. i love waveform*, and i’ve listened to their album, shooting star, a whole lot — they’re a local band with a small, dedicated following. they’re signed to indie-label funnybone records, but let’s assume that they are completely independent. based on the information available, they have averaged about 4,543 streams per song on their new album. that album has been out since march, so these appear to be great numbers! it’s definitely better than many other local bands’ spotify numbers. so if we assume that their album (which is 10 tracks) has 40,543 total streams, we can then assume that waveform* have made about $151 from spotify (and this is an upper-bound amount, for reasons that are clear if you check out that MyEmuIsEmo article). and while $151 is a lot of money for “passive” income, that’s a little over $40 a month, split 2-3 ways among the band’s members. so yeah, they get to buy one dinner at olive garden a month with their spotify royalties. but if you consider the cost of recording shooting star, then the numbers are even more depressing because they are working against a deficit (and i don’t know how much it cost to engineer / mix / master the record).
and again, to be clear: this is a high estimate, and it’s from a local band that has a strong following.
so what can you do? let’s say that you are — like me — strapped for cash, and want to support the artists you love. again, MyEmuIsEmo lays out a set of great tips for fans:
engage with the songs using spotify’s system: “like” songs and add them to playlists. these actions will increase the likelihood that they will end up on other playlists or that the algorithms will recommend them to another listener. back in the day, concert bookers would pay attention to bands’ total Myspace fan count, draw up arbitrary thresholds for booking or taking that into consideration when hiring a supporting act. after Myspace, it became total Facebook likes (in a town i used to gig in, the rule of thumb was that any band with less than 1,000 Facebook likes were probably not going to be allowed on stage). a popular metric these days is the monthly listens. so if you haven’t listened to waveform* in a few weeks, it’s worth streaming one song just to increase the monthly listens count.
be careful about how you listen: listening to a song more than three times within 8 hours may activate a “fraud” policy, where the system believes that you are trying to rig the system. it will then consider those listens (and next subsequent ones) as invalid and will not count towards the artists’ streaming numbers. you may remember when one clever band released a silent album and encouraged listeners to throw it on repeat while they slept. that strategy doesn’t’ work anymore. it would be better to stack up several albums you love on a long playlist and streaming through it while sleeping rather than hit repeat on one album.
buy music if you can: for most local artists, you won’t find their music at physical stores. you CAN for some: redscroll records in wallingford, for example, carries copies of the glambat/snowpiler split, or snake oil’s new record. and hey, buying physical music from a local record store is a win-win opportunity: you come away with a cool piece of art that you can listen to and hold in your hands, and you support a hallowed institution dedicated to keeping the love for music alive. but for the most part, you would need to purchase those songs online, and i understand that buying digital files seems like a primitive behavior for most of us that have known streaming platforms for most of our lives!
buy music from bandcamp if that is an option: bandcamp.com offers favorable royalties compared to itunes or amazon. where itunes takes about 30% off the top, bandcamp only takes about 15%. you get the ability to download the .mp3 files (or .wav), but bandcamp also has an app that allows you to stream albums or songs you’ve purchased. many local artists offer “pay what you want”, with a minimum of $1. even if all you can pay is $1, that is the equivalent to 255ish streams! every little bit helps. i have done this option when i’ve been low on money, and then i make sure to subsequently stream the album on spotify.
and merchandise: for a lot of merchandise, like shirts and (especially) vinyl records, bands have put their own money up front to have those things created. many are just hoping to end up in the black from having an order of cassettes made, or vinyl records pressed. CDs turn out to be quite inexpensive to make, so they offer a large profit margin. just something to consider when you find your band’s merch table after a show. let’s say they only net a profit of $3 on a shirt, that’s still nearly 1,000 streams’ worth of money.
so there you go. it’s a bummer that money has to factor into art, especially if you — the listener — are low on cash. that doesn’t mean that you can’t support your favorite artist, though! hopefully the above streaming tips will have you maximizing the support you give with streaming. and if you do have a little bit of money in your pocket, it can be easy to think of other things to spend it on — spotify/apple music provides this content for free anyways, right? but consider how many hours of pleasure you have gotten from that music. let’s say that you’ve gotten just 10 hours of pleasure from an album (from listening to it several times); many smaller-scale video games would cost you $40 for the same pleasure-to-time ratio!
and because this is the end of the article, i feel compelled to end it on a happy note or some witty pun to close things out. but i’m sleepy, and i don’t feel like contorting this to a satisfying ending. that’s it. see you tomorrow.
