65,000 listeners a month – $800 in revenue. 1.23 cents per listener per month. That works out to 14.7 cents per year. To earn a modest $50,000, you would need ~360,000 monthly listeners. This doesn't seem sustainable without outside sources of revenue.
Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
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Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#22this music is fantastic! Congrats on the success.
I just listened to "Lullabies For Little Crimes" and "Circles", it was great! I'm really happy Spotify found a way to surface artists like this who deserve attention!
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. There will always be times when the internet isn't there for you. To me, flac file backups are king, and what makes bandcamp so good.
Spotify does allow you to store your songs locally on your smartphone. Although you are of course locked into their ecosystem. For me it works, for others it may not be adequate.
Spotify seems to regularly delete all my music downloaded to my phone, and it's where I notice right as I'm losing service.
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#24Does anyone still buy albums on iTunes? I haven't done that in a while, but I have to say I prefer to physically own the music I listen to often. If I can't get a physical media like CD or vinyl, then iTunes store was second best aside from illegal options.
I really like to buy on Bandcamp. They've been running promotions and either forgoing their 15% commission or donating it to Covid/BLM efforts. I think it's one of the best music platforms and I've discovered so many fantastic artists that aren't on Spotify or anywhere else.
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#25I feel Spotify makes it hard to listen to albums. I can queue up a song to play and it’ll then get back to my playlist, but if I play and album eventually it’ll reach the end and quit playing anything. Then I will have to stop what I’m doing and find something else to play. I feel the UX could be improved and it might change listening habits similar to Discover Weekly
What do you want to happen after an album is finished?
Spotify needs better queuing strategies.
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#26His Spotify Artist page lists ~70k plays a month, so he's just slightly over $1/1000 plays. I suppose this is peanuts compared to what a radio play is, etc. but strikes me as fairly reasonable?
Radios don't have to pay anything unless they're an internet stream
I believe that over the air and internet streams are paid out separately.
Over the air looks to play 12c to 6c per play https://www.quora.com/How-much-are-music-artists-paid-in-Roy...
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#27If anybody wants to know how to earn $20/decade with Spotify I can throw some of my own experiences into a blog post :)
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#28With great power comes great responsibility, Spotify Data Scientists. If discover weekly is truly that impactful a decision made by a model to include or not include a song could determine whether or not an indie artist can pay their rent that month. Not quite iris dataset classification. Edit: I should clarify that I only mean that this impact raises interesting questions and DSs (I am one) should pay close attentio…
It's not Spotify's responsibility to make sure indie artists are getting paid.
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#29His comment on albums is interesting. It seems like he's given up on getting press, so albums don't make as much sense for him, but music critics are still the major driver for who gets listens in the non-pop music space. I don't see albums disappearing for that reason. I also enjoy listening to albums much more than singles, but that could just be me.
Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify
#30So in effect, the Spotify Discover Weekly Algorithm has become the 'last dj'