I am considering pulling all my music from Spotify etc...

Do you guys work actively with Spotify for artists do you promote your work in blogs or in vlogs or in podcasts? Do you try to be part of well known playlists?

I just ask because two friends of mine now make money online than they did ever before offline....

Music needs to be promoted needs PR work.

In my experience with Spotify 100,000 plays or so has gotten me around 300 bucks. And that’s as sole performer/songwriter etc. divide that up between a whole team and it’s peanuts. That was one song I got lucky on to get placed on some larger Spotify playlists. I tried with later releases to no avail. You have to get in the consistent millions of plays to get any money from streaming, and even then, it’s really not what it should be.

I'm sort of on the fence about all of this too. Keeping my music out there for now. Not sure how to find my somewhat older audience on these platforms though.

Is wiz talking about re-recording / mixing his past releases and re-uploading ?

I love Dweezil...and his father before him. But, his BS "platform" is just shifting to the music MAKER being the income for the site rather than the consumption of their work. That takes them out of the realm of "helping", IMO. I read over it a LOT...only because I know he understands...but, it's all a pay to play thing. Which I thought would be beneficial for someone with a big following--until I saw they're STILL tiering bandwidth, so the more streaming happens the more YOU are paying THEM...

I don't have my stuff on streaming. Not really out of...objection...but, it's one of those things where I'm not interested in going out of my way to be part of the problem. As to rerecording...I think that is a decision based on artistic desire overlayed to the impressions you've made. Otherwise--a big hit should NOT be rerecorded--it's forever how the public wants it--no matter how terrible you might think that is. But, unless you have a sizable following you're still really on your first album that you have your whole life to make. Mine's a doozy!!

The BlackLabel project years ago was to take all those disparate recordings over the years--redo certain tracks and remix them so at age 40 I'd have a single album that said "look what I can do". #livingColorRef Ironically, a few years later I took the exact tracks and remixed them in HD, because it just sounds SO much better-I actually had ZERO plans to do it--I was literally just goofing around with upsampling the old tracks to learn Mixbus--and actually I DIDN'T upsample the first and Mixbus sound WORSE than my old mixes--I was confused--but I haven't worked in SD (personally) in so many years--I thought "what if I upsample?" And I did--meanign the whoel mixbus engine was running at 96khz--and BOOM "there's the sound"...and I did another--maybe it was a fluke...nope...ok--should I do this whole proejct? I took all old versions down. Mostly so to avoid confusion. The geek in me wanted to keep the old 44.1 Cubase mixes up as a geek comparison...but, I figured it really didn't matter. No one looks to me for experiential knowledge.

But, do you mean because you get listens to new material, and no one goes back catalog? Or because you believe that 2021 "artist currently known as Wiz" can make better MUSIC from those songs? I don't know that the first is fixable. People get really attached to the music of their youth. You're NOT making youth culture music. Nor I--I'm jsut saying..I wasn't when I WAS young...thus, back catalog will never be as appreciated. Much like you could take your 10 worst songs and play them at the bluebird and that audience will give you more love than your ten best sitting on a server somewhere they can listen to "anytime". Alright, maybe I'm digressing...

My point of view is streaming sites in their current form for 99.999% of indie artists, are exposure sites not monetizing ones as the golden rule remains of - He who controls distribution, controls the money.

So what some Indie artists do who view streaming sites the same as social media sites, is they only submit a sampler or a few songs to streaming for platform presence and exposure marketing their brand without giving it all away for free, attempting to draw the consumer back to their own home page for more deeper content and a unique experience where the artist can try to monetize the consumer.

I'm moving the opposite direction. Going to go full force into streaming this year. BUT - you must own the masters and be the artist. Otherwise, you get virtually thousandths of a cent.

The big misconception I see and hear over and over again is that Spotify is making a fortune and they could increase streaming payouts 10x or 100x if they wanted to, but they're paying peanuts because they're greedy bastards.

The greedy bastards part might be true, but the rest is not. Spotify has yet to have profitable year...ever. In fact, they lost nearly a billion dollars last year. How are they going to increase streaming payouts when they are hemorrhaging cash like that?

And for those rooting for streaming services to fail, what would be the result of that? Everyone goes back to buying CDs and carrying a discman around and artists are flush with cash again? Nope. Consumers would go back to pirating it for free, or streaming off of YouTube for free.

In the 90's, which was probably the heyday of recorded music, a casual music listener would spend $10-$30 a month on recorded music (1 or 2 CDs), and a hardcore music fan would spend $50-$100 a month (several CDs). Now a casual music listener spends zero, and a hardcore music listener signs up for a streaming service and pays $10 a month. Pirating was so widespread and so easy for so long that recorded music completely lost its value to consumers, and now the battle is to just try to get people back into the system of actually paying ANY money for recorded music. That's what Spotify is trying to do at this point.

How does a small-time band or artist make money of their music these days? I wish I knew the answer. The answer isn't boycotting streaming services. It would take several of the big artists like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, etc to leave in order for Spotify to even blink. If 10,000 bar bands left Spotify, they wouldn't care. With all due respect to all the small artists, not many people are signing up for a streaming service so they can listen to bar bands and bedroom rappers. Spotify would lose zero subscribers over a boycott like that, so they don't care. They're basically doing a favor by allowing smaller artists to upload their music since it's not bringing them significant new subscriptions.

What we really need is for the general public to start valuing recorded music again and therefore be willing to pay more than $10 a month for it. Then maybe we can see streaming payouts increase.


Links:

"Spotify Lost $2.2 Million per Day Last Year": www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-lost-the-equivalent-of-2-2m-every-day-in-2020-as-it-spent-over-1bn-on-sales-and-marketing-for-the-first-time/

"Spotify Has More Users Than Ever, But It's Still Losing Money": www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/spotify-has-more-users-than-ever-but-its-still-losing-money-1035569/

Spotify is paying out over $1M per HOUR to the majors. consequenceofsound.net/2020/02/major-labels-million-streaming-profits/

The secret is owning the masters and being the artist if you want any decent amount from the streamers. Publishers and writers performance royalties are tinier than tiny. The secret is owning your own $#!% and finding a way to direct people to actually find and hear your stuff. (the real secret). Other companies have been doing it with my music and others music. Old music (20+ years old) that I'm actually almost embarrassed to have out there. But they are making bank on it. I'm taking a note from their playbook. Should know if a few years.