You’ve never heard of me, but I went $50,000 in debt trying to “make it” as a musician, mostly focused on playing the Spotify game.
You would think that much money spent would at least make me somewhat recognizable, so here’s my actual numbers:
I made about $85 in streaming, but a couple thousand dollars from direct music sales (Bandcamp and physical media sales).
I was playing the streaming game, but it’s just that — a game. Actually, there are several games to play. The release schedule game. The playlisting game. The social media game.
Spotify isn’t “the game”. Spotify is the casino full of different games to play.
And the house *always* wins.
Spotify says they paid out $10,000,000,000 (that’s ten billion dollars), but the average indie artist made under $1000 for the entire year.
(Wait…who’s making $1000 per year from Spotify?)
And thanks to Spotify’s 1000 play minimum for a single track to earn anything, that means 87% of tracks on Spotify did not generate any revenue for the artists. And over $40,000,000 in unpaid royalties.
Here’s the thing though:
Streaming didn’t fail us.
We’ve just been playing the wrong game(s).
Artists need to treat Spotify et al. like we did radio (when that was still a thing).
Spotify is a casino; we play the games; the house always wins.
When you go to a casino, there are lots of games to play. They’re pretty much all rigged.
Sort of. I mean, it’s legal, but, they’re all optimized so that you win just enough to get that dopamine hit and keep playing.
There’s a saying, “the house always wins.”
Because in the end, the casino makes all the money.
You’re unlikely to walk away with a big pay day.
And it’s near impossible to build a living as a “professional gambler.”
Streaming does the same thing to us.
You upload some music, and you get a little boost from the algorithm. You get some plays, and a few followers. It feels good. People like your music!
Maybe you get added to a playlist and a bunch more streams come through. Then you hit that 1000 plays threshold and you’ve got pennies trickling in.
That’s proof of concept right there. You can do this. You just need to keep it going. It’ll grow exponentially if you keep at it. That’s what they said.
So, you start researching how to play the games better. And you discover there are even more games to play.
You can play the single release game, instead of doing whole albums. That gets you a small amount of consistent plays early on.
You can play the playlisting game. That’s where your early boost came from that put you into the payment threshold.
You tap into Spotify’s Discovery Mode, where they pay you less (30% less!) but promise more promotion on their part. It’s worth it, right? They said it is. Why would they do it if it wasn’t? You just gotta get those release numbers up to make up for it.
Next thing you know, you’ve spent money on playlisting, Facebook ads, marketing courses, and anything else you could find.
And you’re getting plays! It’s not making the money back…yet…you just have to keep going!
For every 1000 streams you get, you make $3, up to $5 if you’re lucky.
You get that dopamine hit. That motivation to keep going.
But it’s small payouts.
And they never add up.
There Is Money In Music Sales
You need thousands of streams to make $10 on Spotify, but only one single sale of an album on Bandcamp.
I’m not here to shill for Bandcamp specifically. You can use WooCommerce on your own site (I do). Or Shopify. Or Ko-Fi. There are tons of options.
But I’m going to use Bandcamp because we have more statistics from them, more proof of concept.
Bandcamp has shown year after year people are willing to drop $10 or more on an album of music they like to support artists they admire.
And you keep over 80% of that.
There has also been an increase in physical media sales over the last few years.
People are buying cassettes and vinyl. People are buying CDs again! Wtf???
I don’t know why. I’m one of them, though. Personally I buy in this order of availability: cassette; if they don’t have it then a vinyl, if they don’t have it than a CD, if they don’t have it than digital download.
Bandcamp and other platforms like this don’t have super great discovery, though. They’re working on it, of course. I applaud them for that.
But if you’re like me and are obsessed with self-hosting and keeping as much money as possible, you get basically no discovery algorithm.
That’s where we go back to streaming, but we treat it like radio.
Streaming Is The New Radio (and we need to treat it that way).
It is true that we need streaming for discovery. That is the current dominating force in discovery, and we can’t get around that.
But before streaming, it was radio.
We didn’t release entire albums on radio for many reasons that are probably false equivalents for my argument so I’ll skip all that.
Streaming services know they are necessary for this, and that’s why they can pay us so little yet keep us coming back.
They know exactly what they’re doing, and they’re going to milk it for everything they can in the short term. They’ve optimized revenue for it.
So, we’re going to both let them, and not let them, at the same time.
By removing our albums and only releasing singles for the sake of discovery.
In a future post, I’ll really break down the “how to” in a guide that I’m working on (yes it will be a free blog post). Until then, let me keep it brief:
The way radio used to work was that you would put out a single ahead of an album release.
It builds hype, then the album comes out and you get (hopefully) lots of sales.
Drop another single shortly after.
Work some music videos in there.
Do a tour.
Sell some T-Shirts. Hopefully make lots of sales of those, too.
I 9001% believe we as artists can take back control from streaming services if we treat them like radio.
I mean heck they’re barely paying us anyway. Spotify Discovery mode where they keep 30% MORE of your earnings? Fine, Spotify; you can have it. But you’re only getting my singles.
I don’t even think a lot of, or even major artists, need to do this for this to succeed.
If one artist (me) does this, I think I will do just fine.
But the more of us are doing this, the better.
I’ll write more about this in the near future. I just wanted to get this idea out there now to start the momentum in 2026.
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