The reality of the streaming economy

We have 11 albums distributed by DistroKid, who do a great job for a very reasonable fee. It’s almost exactly a year since we started using them and we’ve added several releases during that year.

We push our music on various social media to the best of our ability, constantly trying new approaches and learning from “experts”. We don’t spam people too much (hopefully!) and we try to build relationships with our fans.We pay for some
advertising on some of our social media sites.

Here are our year’s earnings as of just now.

iTunes   $0.48
Apple Music   $1.96
Spotify   $11.97
Deezer   $4.28
YouTube   $0.42
Google Play   $2.56
Amazon   $1.12
iHeart Radio $0.03

Total   $18.88

We’re retiring to the Bahamas any day now.

We make a little more money from Bandcamp and we’d like to give a huge “Thank you!” to those who pay for our music.  However, the costs of maintaining these accounts, paying for cover artwork and adverts etc, is not even remotely covered by this income.

This isn’t particularly a moan (honestly!), just an observation of the nature of the current music economy if you don’t make mainstream music and you’re not in a position to earn money from gigs or merchandise. We don’t really have an answer and we acknowledge that history doesn’t go backwards. The old economy is not going to return.