So you want to get 1,000,000 streams? No wait you want 10,000,000 streams.
There are a few things you should know first.
The image above may seem misleading, because if you are popular enough to make real money off of Spotify, you are probably popular enough to where Spotify isn't your main money maker. This paradox begs the question: "Why should we care about Spotify numbers anyway"?
There is more to it than the money.
Of course you want to make money when people stream your music, but before you go comparing what you would make off 1,000,000 streams (about $1,000 to $8,000 if you own all your masters and your publishing) to what you would make off of 1,000,000 record sales, let's go back in time to when people actually sold records and take a few facts into consideration about the apples and oranges you've got in your basket.
Records have to be printed, packaged and shipped to stores in order for you to sell them. If you want to sell a million records, you have to print, package and ship a million records. Let's imagine that you were getting each record at 1 dollar per unit, packaging them for 1 dollar per unit, and shipping them at $.20 per unit just for easy calculation. These numbers aren't unrealistic but keep in mind the prices for these services varied widely based on your position within the market, and if you were an indie artist only capable of investing a few thousand dollars at a time it would likely be much more expensive than that. This would mean that you would have to spend 2.2 million dollars up front just to get these records in the hands of retailers who themselves would conduct the transaction with the final customer, and pay you your share once the sales cycle was complete. Unless the customers were waiting outside the record store on the eve of your official release, that took time, time during which you would be in debt for the amount invested in printing, packaging and shipping all these goods.
Spotify in particular, and streaming services in general solved that problem. Now with the click of a mouse and about $50 that you pay any of the of digital distributors like CD BABY, TUNECORE or DISTROKID, you can have your music available EVERYWHERE on the date and time of your choosing. No shipping containers full of product, no customs clearance, no scratched records, no 6 month wait time between when you turn in the masters to your record label, and when the vinyl, cassette or CD factory actually gets around to printing your physical product.
Under those circumstances, the only people who could sell 1,000,000 records had to have someone willing to pay that 2.2 million up front, and wait 6 months to a year to even see 1 penny return on their investment.
There are countless examples of bands who sold millions of their first record, only to break even on the debt they incurred directly with the record label, who in turn only broke even on the investment they made in the band to get those records into the hands of the outlets that sold them. That's not even considering all of the marketing money necessary to get a million records sold for a band that nobody knows about. Starting a band and making it big implied taking a huge risk, and virtually nobody had the capital necessary to take that risk themselves, which is why record labels had all the power, and gate kept the hell out of those record store shelves.
Fast Forward to the 2020s
Your streams are not equivalent to record sales, but neither is the investment necessary to generate those streams.
If your music is undeniably good, then every time someone hears it you'll get a new fan, and hopefully they will share it with all their friends generating the thing we now covet most as creators... going viral.
So now you get to focus on your music being great. Not good, but great. Which is what we always wanted as musicians right? But there is a drawback. The laws of supply and demand dictate that if the financial barrier to entry into the market is so low, everybody and their grandmother is going to want to put out that album that no record label would have ever taken a risk on. This is readily observable considering that there are about 100,000 songs being released every day.
So much music is being released that the world is noisy, and the artists that float to the top are the ones who are able to penetrate the noise, and through doing so, control people's perception of what the noise should sound like.
But still, why care about Spotify numbers?
Spotify gives you the opportunity to profile your work in an equivalent way to all other creators. In fact, regardless of the streaming platform you use, your work shows up on that platform in the same way the top selling artist's does. All the tools for how to portray your music through the platform are essentially the same. There is a space for photos, banners, a bio, your album art, perhaps room for a few links to guide people to your main points of contact. Whether you are Mr. "Ye", or Mr. "Ne" your profiles offer you the same display tools regardless of how big you are. What you do with those tools is your business, so you can be as creative as you want to be with your product's "package". You get the shelf and the end cap in the record store, formatted the way that you decide.
Spotify does offer one big distinguisher between your work and all the no-name bands competing for your listener's attention. Stream counts and monthly listener counts.
Its true, people judge a song by the number of streams it has, and the number of monthly listeners an artist has. It's almost unconscious, but the second you open up an artist's profile, the banner can look super cool, the band name gives you the perfect mental image that aligns with the profile picture, the songs all sound dope and you are thinking that Spotify gave you the perfect recommendation. But as a listener you will hear a song with 10,000,000 streams differently than one that has the dreadful >1000 number next to it. It's an undeniable fact of life, but Spotify didn't invent it. It's a feature that has become a staple of all social tech platforms that we refer to as Social Proof, and it's formatted to offer you an incentive as a creator to share and promote your content to as many people as possible.
So little did you know, but you recorded your album, mixed and mastered all the songs, got a visual artist to do your album cover.. you did everything right! Only to learn that you have become involved in a ridiculous popularity contest where whomever has the most resources to dedicate to promotion, or who can devise a system of bot driven traffic to beat the algorithm, gets the Social Proof and therefore gets the gigs, glory and gets to have only brown M&Ms on their backstage rider. In come the gate keepers who manage the monetary investments and the calculated digital marketing strategies that help artists rise to the top of the pack (shameless plug for the website that brought you this article, check out our services here).
But there is a catch in your favor, if your music is good, it's good, and it will be readily apparent because each person that hears it will love it, and they'll share it. That act repeated enough times will send the gatekeepers to your doorstep, and they will offer you the money and strategic planning necessary to break you and elevate you as far as you want to go.
Virality has always been a thing. After Jimi Hendrix played his first big gig at the Monterrey Pop Festival in in 1967 it took only 6 months before he was the highest grossing touring act of all time. The dude went viral at a time when even making an out of state call required going through an operator. His music was undeniable to the first time listener, and if yours is too, then this will be easy. Correction, it won't be easy, it will require a lot of work and a lot of risk nonetheless, but at least the amount you have to invest to finally make it is less, right? Well, sure... There are plenty of examples of artists whose songs were so good, and went viral so quickly, that they literally got the start-up capital to hire their touring band and send it all over the world before they ever played a single dive bar. But, there are also plenty of artists that are discovering where, what and how they can become viral by seeing what works on the platforms based on their social proof numbers.
But still, why care about Spotify numbers?
Well the public facing numbers are the stream counts and monthly listener counts, but that isn't all there is to it. One of the great things that streaming platforms offer you is a real-time snapshot of who is listening to your music and where. You'll see your stream count broken down by city, by country, with demographic information like age range and gender. You'll even see the source of streams - whether they came from people adding you to playlists, people coming directly to your profile, or from playlists that Spotify puts together to suggest new artists (hopefully you) to users that don't know you already. Every time they save your song, like your song, or go to your profile to find out more about you, Spotify tracks that information and uses it to justify exposing your music to more people. You might wake up one day and discover that your music blew up in Belgium for some reason you don't know, but that's information that you can work with to make more calculated decisions about how you market your music, where you market your music and to whom. In the peak days of record sales, the only entities capable of compiling enough of that data to inform the marketing campaign for a bands follow up album was the record company. They did that by investing in and managing the sales cycle of the artist from start to finish. Now, all of that knowledge is at your fingertips, making you part of the most empowered generation of independent artists there has ever been.
(If you have music out there go to artists.spotify.com and claim your profile to see what I mean)
But is it fair?
That's a question I will save for part two of this series "The Complete Guide To Crushing it On Spotify" check back here, and if you are interested in Music Marketing and developing your career as an artist, hit us up in the contact section and let's get something going. Thanks for reading!
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