For those of you who haven’t noticed yet – I’ve decided to digitize my catalog of music and throw it into the gargantuan multitentacled global beast that is online streaming. It is remarkably easy: For about the cost of a mediocre dinner at Applebee’s, anyone can submit their music to digital ‘distributors’ and be placed into stores and music streaming sites among all the best musical artists on Earth, as well as the great unpaid horde of lowly working musicians euphemistically referred to as ‘content creators’ like myself. As of today, my first 3 albums and 2 singles, a total of 34 songs, are on Spotify, Apple music, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon music, iHeart radio, Pandora, and a bunch more places I’ve never heard of. Should anyone accidentally stumble across one of my songs and like it, it can be licensed for pennies and used in THEIR content on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and X.
Included in my “distribution deal” are detailed statistics (including those in real time so you can be depressed with each passing minute), showing me exactly how few people are actually listening to my songs. It’s a festival of zeros. My overall impression is that the internet has become the ultimate ‘exposure gig’ – a dreaded term ALL working musicians have encountered while being told they’re not making any money.
The good news is, it’s not that difficult to get your music heard online. I’m doing it the old-fashioned way – I’m paying for it. That’s about all I can say here as most streaming services have rules against this, despite an entire industry popping up offering streams for cash. There’s also draconian rules about music containing ‘loops’ (strictly verboten!) those audio snippets of a particular instrument or combination of instruments that everyone and their mother uses during studio recording. If You tube wants to try and tease out a shaker loop in one of my songs, I say have at it. What they’re trying to avoid is a deluge of loop compositions – those annoying techno-dance-EDM bastardizations that make you want to leave Forever 21 as fast as possible. I’ve composed a few myself; Fun to put together but can cause catatonia (and/or suicidal thoughts) as a listener. The problem is – anyone can make them, and obviously only us professional musicians can be trusted when composing mindless repetitive techno-crap.
As the world's largest streaming platform, Spotify currently has over 100 million songs, 6 million podcasts and 350 thousand audiobooks available on their platform. They have 626 million monthly active users (MAUs) and 246 million paid subscribers spread across 184 regions of the world. They generate 19+ billion a year and it is going up by nearly 2 billion dollars each year. Somewhere in there are my 34 songs.
Now that I’m promoting my music, some interesting insights have emerged:
- In the 2 months I’ve been promoting on Spotify I have a total of 73,414 streams spread over 11,271 listeners.
- I have a little over 6 thousand monthly active users (MAUs). For comparison, Taylor Swift has almost 92 million MAUs. Clearly, I need to spend more money.
- Men like my music more than women. Upon noticing this, I released a ballad about family and the percentage of women listening jumped by 5%.
- My listeners are not young, or old. Less than 1% of them are under 18 and only 6% are over 60… well, I never did act my age so that kinda makes sense. Those 23 to 59 years old make up the bulk of my listeners.
- My top country for streams is not-surprisingly the US, with New York and Los Angeles locked in a battle for the top city.
- My average streams per listener is around 7 which is encouraging. After all, they could listen to one song and then skedaddle.
- My listeners have saved 2,214 of my songs to their library and I’ve been added to 126 playlists.
- I have 69 followers. Last week I got a very festive email from Spotify that I had reached over 100 followers, but something horrific happened and around 40 of them ran away in terror on October 15th.
- I have 28 listeners in Brazil and not one of my songs is in Portuguese.
- Somewhere in Malta, a single music lover streamed one of my tunes and earned me .003 cents. I’m global!
So, what’s my goal in all this? I don’t have one! That’s the beauty of it! I love just knowing people are listening. A good friend of ours recently heard my song ‘Annabel’ while driving and didn’t realize it was me until my name showed up on her dashboard. How cool is that? Of course, there is a downside to having your face in the digital landscape. I recently discovered, by accident, that my first album – ‘It’s a Country Thing’ which was released in 2006, is listed on iHeart radio with the artist name of ‘Tard’. Oh well…I’ve been called worse.