Spotify Fame & Fortune *Deeply Ironic Content Warning!*

Music Makers Progress Logs
#1

…so this little yearly summary popped up on my “Spotify for Artists” app…
I thought it was hilarious, so I posted it on my Instagram account (for all of my 76 followers) with the natty comment: “Did you know you can listen to FytaKyte on Spotify? No? It looks like you are not alone! :joy:”
(BTW, for the uninitiated, FytaKyte is my music project - me and a few occasional collaborators)

Streams
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My Sister assured me that her husband was playing my music all morning just to keep me off the streets… To which I replied: “At 0.004 cents a stream, if he keeps it up for a month straight and I may be able to buy a new guitar…string!”

… I checked my aggregator’s account the other day, and apparently across all the streaming platforms that my music is on (and it is on them all - Spotify, YT, Pandora, Deezer etc etc) I’ve racked up a total of about $28 in streaming revenue :laughing:

I’ve actually made a couple of hundred from Bandcamp, though - mainly by offering the multitracks for Meandersaur as a bonus for buying the album.

All in good fun… I’m not complaining… In fact, I’m stoked that at least I get to share my music with some people outside my immediate family and friends, and that they appear to listen to it of their own volition.

Anyone else have their music on streaming platforms? Are you doing it seriously? Or are you just doing it for fun like me?

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#2

haha… oops, am laughing at myself, not at you… but I decided to check my spotify account, haven’t looked at it all year and then couldn’t figure out how to copy the image but you are more than twice as many everythings than me. I think I have earned about $8. I only put stuff on there originally so my grandkids could access my silly kidsongs. I did intend to ‘grow it’ and get into some marketing stuff but I got stalled with wanting to have animations to go with it all. Must admit that I totally suck at self-promotion, for me, it’s just the music, for better or worse! So yeah, for me, the FUN is everything…

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#3

Ahh… well that makes me feel MUCH better! :laughing:

It seems redundant to say so after my OP, but “Me too!”… I absolutely hate it!.. to quote Bart Simpson: “LOOK AT ME! I’m DOIN’ STUFF!!!”

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#4

A big issue with me is my LOATHING of social media, well, it means I have a fundamental flaw in any marketing campaign!
:crazy_face:

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#5

I do have my music on streaming platforms. Though I have had my good days on youtube when revenues where in the 5 figure ballparks but that was years ago. I have not put serious effort into it after Youtube changed a whole bunch of things with royalties and you get nearly no share and your music is hidden unless you pay to be featured with trending tracks… well that and I got into family stuff.

Streaming ( youtube, itunes, Facebook etc ) roughly generates roughly in the ballpark few hundreds a month… I get much more results working with dance / yoga workout studios and collaborating with them in bundling my albums into their studio promos. Meaning actual physical CDs bundled with their programs to entice more clients. That did good … until the covid fiasco turned it upside down. I have worked over the last few years for scoring studios and some indie labels for music for trailers, documentaries and commercials. I travelled internationally for it to help produce. None of them are on streams though.

These days I am back to my nerdy job and hobbyist levels of sound production. I am not giving up yet though with streaming.

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#6

I practice at self promotion every day. I stand in front of the mirror and say “you’re good” “you’re talented”
and the mirror answers back…“nope you’re just old and bald”.

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#7

I’m with Emma and Andrew. I despise self marketing. I don’t enjoy spending a lot of time on social media, screaming “Look at me, look at me !” I don’t even want to post my pics, music or videos. I’m really struggling between the desire for recognition, love, accolades on one hand and then on the other hand, the desire for total isolation and anonymity. It’s a very uncomfortable dichotomy. I even feel a bit shy posting comments on this forum. Anybody who’s seen me perform onstage would think I must be kidding because I behave like a confident show-off when I’m performing. In actuality, I’m quite shy and introverted.

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#8

AMEN!

Wow, I’d be super-happy with that!.. I can dream!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: … Oh, come now Paul… I’ve seen pictures of you… you’re not…bald! :laughing:

Very well expressed, W… Performance is a necessity to express art, and it’s damn fun to do - especially when the band is tight and the crowd is responsive… but it’s only for an hour or two and then you should be able to go back to normal. I don’t think anyone with any well-proportioned sense of self-worth wants their whole life to be a “performance”.

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#9

Great topic. I’ve never put my stuff up anywhere except Soundcloud, and that only because it’s very convenient. Some of my tunes have been played several hundred times, which is nice to see, but it doesn’t generate any revenue. I wouldn’t even try to do that, it’d be an exercise in futility to be sure!

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#10

My music is on all of the usual streaming platforms and besides getting random 30 dollar checks here and there, I don’t even think about it. I do exactly zero promotion. None. Zilch. I have completed albums just sitting the can because there’s just no point in putting them out. I flat-out refuse to do any promotion whatsoever. I have no social media accounts.

There was one brief moment several years ago where one of my dumbest songs somehow got some traction in eastern Europe and I sold a bunch of singles of this one song in Germany and Poland and various other small ex-Soviet splinter countries. I also found my song on Russian torrent sites. Lol. I suspect someone with a punk rock blog or a podcast found this song somehow and liked it and their followers picked it up too. I really do not know how or why this happened.

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#11

I hate it too. It’s something I’ve learned to just plug my nose and do. But it’s easier to justify when it’s the difference between having a job and not.

There are pros and cons to turning a hobby into a business. The pros are that it is self funding, so you get to spend more time on your hobby. The cons are that it becomes a requirement and you have to do it even when you don’t want to.

I go through phases. Sometimes I don’t even want people to buy stuff because I just don’t feel like engaging. I’m not a big fan of performing in any sense, even if the stage is small. It’s good to get feedback and recognition, but sometimes I just don’t feel like caring. I try to set things up in a way that I can take advantage of my mood when I don’t mind engaging, but be able to shut off when I don’t care.

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#12

You mean like cartoons?

Anyone here uses Pond5 and Shutterstock? to sell clips and tracks? They seem to be picking up lately. I post some of my experimental stuff there for fun, mostly commericial music, royalty free samples and once in a while I get a payment from there and its like Christmas lol. There is an approval process through a curator network they use which is lengthy but worth it.

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#13

Am playing with animated line drawings…
But because I don’t draw easily on a tablet and have high expectations it is a steep learning curve. Am interested in those sites, will check them out ta.

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#14

Yes this is frustrating, but the hard truth is that in our society music is a product like any other and there is a system you can’t escape, in which a product only sells when you market it, meaning investing a lot of time and money.

There are 40,000 new songs uploaded to Spotify every single day so it’s safe to assume that you can’t just upload a song randomly and expect it to pick up just because someone liked it and shared it.

When I was young I had big dreams in the music world but that didn’t last long. I was making music with someone who went on to become rich and famous. I co-wrote and arranged songs with him, and played a lot of the instruments in the studio when he got his record deal. Some of these songs have millions of streams, one of them has been chosen by Sofia Coppola in Lost in Translation, that did really well. But for some reason he chose to never mention me, not to mention offering to pay (to be fair, I didn’t ask either). So that, plus the fact that just like @emma (and most of you, looks like), I am not the kind of person who is comfortable with selling oneself, further convinced me that there was no hope for me in this part of the music business.

Anyway, sorry for the personal rant, I don’t talk about this often but a movie has just been released on this guy an seeing him recounting his beginnings while completely leaving me out of the picture brought back a lot of memories in a bittersweet way. Back to Spotify.

It’s interesting to see that I have quite a few more streams than you, but earned a lot less… I know there are big differences between countries for Spotify payouts but the difference range is astounding: I have roughly 10x more streams and x10 LESS revenue, which makes a x100 difference ratio if my math is correct… Definitely something to look into if I had any interest in making money out of my music.

I guess what we are after is more recognition/gratitude than money, and I totally agree with you @ColdRoomStudio, it’s nice to see that a few strangers from around the globe are listening to what we did and seem to enjoy it.

Personally I feel really lucky because I discovered (late) that I actually was more comfortable with working on others’ music than making my own and I made it my full-time job one year ago. The pay is bad but I now have more work than I can handle and many happy clients so that makes me happy in turn.

When do you plan on releasing the next album Andrew? How many songs do you have ready besides Progress? I haven’t been here much lately and I probably missed a lot of news.

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#15

yeah its ghost writing. It happens a LOT. I have done it too, its a harsh and degrading reality. I had written and composed a backtrack for a very famous song, I was indeed paid to write it, I added many parts, flutes, strings and gave it all emotion i could possibly. It ended up with over 100 million streams but since I never negotiated a bigger contract at the start, they never credited me.

I have heard these days it happens even more, even with huge composers. I have tried to overcome the sheer dissapointed of it but I tread carefully these days.

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#16

Must feel even worse when you’ve contributed to the song so much! In all honestly my contributions were minor, I was never the one coming up with the first original ideas.

#17

Do you feel like you’d have enough going on that it wouldn’t be a problem to have a standard contract that pays for both your immediate services and also for a minimal share of future earnings?
It would probably have to be structured so that you only got involved monetarily after a certain level of profitability, but at least you’d have a chance.
A lot of the frustration is constantly being asked to give away talent and thousands of hours of practice with no return.

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#18

I know what you mean. The other day I saw my doctor, I told him every day I wake up, I feel awful. I look in the mirror, I wanna throw up.
He says I don’t know what’s wrong with you but your eyesight’s perfect.

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#19

I like that one! :+1:

#20

As almost everyone has said, the self promotion, social media necessity is a burden that I often choose to ignore too.
I don’t mind making a video every now and then, but I simply don’t have the time patience or energy to do that regularly, especially when I could be making more music in that time.
Even as we speak, I was trying to find royalty free, public domain footage of an idea I had for a clip but came up empty handed.

Like @ColdRoomStudio, I have made about $10-$20 across all my projects on streaming platforms, yet have made ten times that on bandcamp (which I adore, as most of you know).

No you can’t yet I think we do. And, in a VERY small way, that actually happened to me last week! I have my Alien Lard EP coming out officially on streaming platforms this Thursday (Australia time) but released it a couple of weeks early on bandcamp. I did not promote it at all, yet a stoner rock blog stumbled across it and reviewed it.
Because of that, I had 17 extra people listen from that source. Now, that’s not a lot, but it’s 17 more than I would ever have had if they did not review my work. And that’s without submitting it anywhere or promoting it at all.

I often find more joy in strangers checking out my stuff than people I know. That way I know it’s the music that they are interested in and nothing to do with knowing me as a person. Is that what others feel?

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