Honestly I feel a little broken today....

^^^^ This, 100%. Me and the boys talk about this regularly, as in "wouldn't it be great to be known/popular/successful" etc, etc. Or, "we need to get more songs out". Every time it comes up (last Saturday on Zoom) I reply the same way- I do it for them and pretty much nothing else. I do it because they are life-long friends since high school, brothers from other mothers, and every hour and every penny I invest in all the things it takes to make music is because the time we've spent together (and will again when COVID is over) is precious to me. After six years of writing music we have barely one album of our own material, and it doesn't bother me. Some people paint to fulfill their artistic ambition. We make music, since we were 15 (we all just entered our 60s). Yes we are old, but we rock more than ever, and our passion is undiminished. I wouldn't have it any other way.


Keep pushing Peter.  There's a reason why we all keep making music in the face of intense adversity. We are musicians. What else would we do?

I've been in a similar boat with boxes of CDs that are now sitting in a closet barely selling at all. They sold ok when the artist was touring a bit, but I have tried to give copies away to friends only to be told "I don't have a CD player anymore." The artist was resistant to any streaming sites but years later I think the writing is on the wall.
This isn't an issue of people no longer listening to music and no money being generated from it; it's an issue of the billions being generated by ad revenue on streaming platforms are not being fairly paid back to the artists. 

Here were some stats on the subject that I found interesting.
"In the first months of 2020, audio consumption appeared to be well on its way to meeting or surpassing last year’s H1 year-over-year (y-o-y) growth of 15.7%, with year-to-date growth reaching 14.6% by March 12. Yet, between March 13 and July 2, total audio activity grew by only 6.2%, bringing total 2020 year-to-date growth to 9.4%.

Total album sales dropped 18.1% y-o-y in H1, with much of the decline coming during the months following the start of the pandemic (-25.2%).

Physical albums were clearly impacted by the pandemic. Pre-COVID-19 data shows growth of 4.6%, but sales plummeted 35.4% in the following months, resulting in a y-o-y decrease of 20.3% to 27.9 million. Digital album sales continued to decrease (-14.3%), albeit less than at the same time in 2019, with sales figures down by a smaller amount after the declaration of the pandemic, likely as consumers switched their album buying from physical to digital formats.

Vinyl LP sales, which is included in the physical album sales data, remains the exception, growing by 11.2% y-o-y to reach 9.2 million sales.

Although on-demand audio streaming seems to have been somewhat impacted by the pandemic, it is the driving force behind audio consumption growth, as it has been for the past few years. Indeed, while streaming did dip after the reported growth of 20.4% pre-COVID-19 to 13.8% post-COVID-19, H1 y-o-y growth remained in double-digits (16.2%), to reach 419.8 billion streams.

Other data from Comscore shows that the time spent consuming streaming audio increased during COVID-19. It looks as though some of this increase was spent with Jazz and Classical music. While other genres of streaming audio such as Children’s (+57.4%), Country (+21.2%), Latin (+17.7%), R&B/Hip-Hop (+13.6%) and Pop (+13.5%) saw y-o-y growth overall during the first half of the year, only the soothing sounds of Jazz (+3.1%) and Classical (4.5%) saw growth in the post-COVID-19 months. Classical, in particular, went from a decrease of 1.3% in streams pre-COVID-19 to 8.7% growth after March 12."
www.marketingcharts.com/industries/media-and-entertainment-114490

Lest people loose hope and actually BELIEVE there is no money to be made in music anymore......

"According to a new report by Music Business Worldwide, major labels raked in $1 million an hour off streaming in 2019 alone."

BTW, that's roughly 9 BILLION a year.  I think there's plenty of money floating around in the music biz.  It just doesn't seem to be ending up in the right hands.....

Sounds like a big number but there are two problems. One, it is down big time from its peak in the late 90s, so the pie is smaller - 30-70% smaller, depending on how you count. And second, the pie is sliced up between a LOT more people.

Yes, I agree with you. But the industry as a whole is around half the size it was in 1999, with what seems like a hundred times as many hands in the pot.

Everybody including you had thier Wiz phase. Its hard to stay optimistic ... seeing one of my songs was used for a documentary and for thousands of streams german GEMA payed me 50 bucks. Come on.

I hear you Bill and in theory I don't disagree--I've done a lot of career reinventing over the years.  But should every hardworking, talented musician and AE be asked to constantly reinvent the wheel and create their own career model?  Not every artist has an entrepreneur's brain.  Did we ask Steve Jobs or Jack Welch to write a symphony or mix a hit record?  

It really helps to by savvy with the business end of things.  But until the system allows artists to focus on being artists a lot of talented people will never succeed--or worse yet, never even try.   

The streamers still whine about not being able to turn a profit...and that’s with paying out only 10% to the creators. But when an impression is worth (supposedly) .005 cents, that is only .0005 cents split between the writers and publishers. That’s $500 per million. Got a publisher? Now you have at least $250. Got a co—writer? No you’ve got $125.
How many independent artists ever even sniff one million impressions?

This is not a living wage for intellectual property. Especially when songwriters (in the US) don’t have the right to negotiate pricing or the ability to withhold their music. The owners of the masters control that. (Labels)

Sounds awesome man! Love that first verse. So just my opinion, but I think steel would really take that over the top.

Part of the problem here is scale, in the age of Streaming where we own less and less we no longer have any purchases of 1. Now myself included rent so to speak so the entire scheme is based on each time I decide to rent each song. Most of us probably don’t play a track or album enough to justify the old school payments based off n the new world schedule, but we could all afford to eat on it.
I just saw an article talking about the Biden campaign paying $2.50 per 1000 impressions and I couldn’t help but think some small market radio station sales guy was either laughing his ass off or throwing up based on his numbers and what he charged. See that’s the thing we were all sold this whole bill of goods that the internet and streaming offered the possibility of these huge numbers numbers, they never materialized but like Las Vegas the music biz isn’t about what’s real, it’s about what could be.

The solution? Everybody gets to right a Taylor Swift single? Strike? Hell if I know, but I do know this with COVID and the disappearance of live gigs with the revenue they brought it in more and musicians are taking a hard look at how this all pays out and nobody is happy.