I started getting a sense of all this about 10 years ago. My first real eye opener was when I posted a few songs on SoundCloud through an aggregator. I was getting their ads 100 to 1 over listens while following their suggestions. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re a mouse getting sold cheese by a mousetrap company.
All this was a great incentive to learn how to learn recording and production, at least to a reasonable level, and stop expecting anything beyond personal satisfaction. I would be happy with being able to buy new strings with the fruits of my labor, but as you accurately pointed out the marketing labor required to break even on that proposition makes no sense.
My goal now is to find a singer for my band, The Wheezing Geezers. I’m going to put out an ad that says: “No singing talent needed, but Phd. In T Shirt sales required”.
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Wow those are pretty sobering figures - I remember the amount of effort you put in… It seems that unless you are willing to sell your soul, you have absolutely not a proverbial snowball’s chance.
My most “successful stream of income” (take the words “successful” and “income” with a gigantic grain of salt, btw) has actually been Bandcamp.
Since I absolutely loathe promoting myself to complete strangers (and people I know, even more), I decided to experiment with setting up something that might appeal to a group of like-minded individuals, and perhaps offer some value. That made me feel the least yucky about it.
I decided to offer all the multitrack files of my last album with any purchase of the album from Bandcamp. This took an absolute tonne of work to set up, but over the past 3 years, sales on Bandcamp have totalled approx. $450. That compares to about $130 in total sales from streaming, digital downloads and synch licensing in that same time period from my aggregator, CD Baby.
Haha! This cracked me up!
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that is a great strategy to be honest. Since Bandcamp is a platform of more musicians and less consumers. Chance of musicians grabbing high quality productions is good. Hopefully the licensing is clean. Are they royalty free tracks? Either way good way to earn a little extra. Nice work Andrew!
Those days were crazy humbling experiences. I don’t regret it. Though the result was not quite what I expected it to be after a decade and a half, I am overall extremely happy with the end result. I feel calm and more focused, knowing my place in the industry. Professionally writing music for cinematics and theatrics. Maybe one more decade…and who knows if my music will eventually be played at the Vienna Imperial Hall 
(one can dream lol)
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(one can dream lol)