I Took My Music Off of Streaming Sites
I had recently pulled my music off of the streaming sites. I canceled my Distrokid subscription.
In 2008, when I started releasing albums, there was a certain excitement around the web and what it would bring for musicians. You could distribute your own music. You didnāt have to follow the rules. The old gatekeepers were still there, but you didnāt have to play their game. You could make a space that worked for you.
It was also a time when making your own music started to become incredibly cheap at home. If you already had a computer, you were half way there. Software and hardware, depending on what you chose, didnāt have to be expensive. And you could make something with meager tools that sounded professional.
It seemed like a time where there was an explosion of creativity; or at least more people had the tools to create and their output was easier to find. The music was made by people who, a mere 10 years earlier, would have had to jump through an endless series of hoops to put together an album and distribute it. And it would have been expensive and difficult to get people to listen. It has been an absolute golden age for making your own music, and still is.
It was also a great time for discovering music. Itās really easy to forget that before fast-enough access to the internet, it was much harder to find and discover music.
I started off releasing music for free, in part, because it was an extension of what I had always done on the internet. I had āmade a thingā and wanted to share it. That was always the cool thing about the web to me: the culture of sharing and discovery.
I never really actively tried to make money with musicābesides your typical āpay what you wantā schemeābut at one point in time, I used to get a reasonable number of downloads of my albums. In the grand scheme of things, it wasnāt really that big of a deal but I was overjoyed that anyone bothered to listen. Also with releasing creative commons music, my music has gotten included in many of other peopleās projects, videos, games, and podcasts.
I continued to release music consistently, but the number of downloads dwindled each year. I still would get a fair amount of people using the music in their projects; eventually that dwindled as well.
I donāt personally use Spotify or any of the streaming sites for listening, and never have; itās just not my jam (I like managing my own digital collection). Iām aware that, most people do.
I had a desire for people to listen. Fast forward to ~2020, that is when I signed up for Distrokid, to distribute to the streaming sites. I figured Iād meet people where they are actually listening to music.
Not that I had any level of success on streaming sites. I told myself Iāll keep the music up if I do better than breaking even given the Distrokid yearly fee. Iāve never accomplished that pathetic goal and kept it up for 5 years. You could argue I didnāt put the right effort into marketing. Or that I didnāt make music people wanted. Or that I didnāt put effort into social media. Or that Iām joined streaming too late. Or that I make things that arenāt in style. Youād be right.
Itās also just much harder to get attention today, even if you put in the appropriate effort. It is what it is.
Anyway, this has always mostly just been a hobby to me. Iād like to focus on what is fun for me. A part of me feels bad about the removal for the sake of the few people that did listen on these platforms. Itās a bit of an āact of violenceā to pull music from peopleās hands like that.
On the other hand, the music is still released under a creative commons attribution license. You can do basically what you want with it as long as you give me credit for the music. You can download for free, distribute it, or remix it. What I do is pretty generous, all things considered.
I donāt think these platforms work for me. I donāt think they work for most independent musicians ā commercially or otherwise. It doesnāt pay. It doesnāt work for discovery; they push what benefits their platform and allows them to pay less. The platforms actively are gunning to flatten culture into a paste. These companies seem to lack any semblance of ethics. Other people are much better at articulating the ills of streaming music companies, so Iām not going to dwell too much on it.
I donāt believe the future of music is in streaming; or at least in the form it currently exists. Maybe Iām naive. Independent music works best when it is organized by independent musicians and their listeners from the bottom up. I donāt think musicians need to collectively demonstrate their desperation for attention, for the sole benefit of streaming music companies.
But I donāt know...Iām just an amateur hobby musician who posts music I want in the world on the internet. I have a Bandcamp page. Itās easy for me because there really isnāt much at stake. Iām already irrelevant, so I have all the power in this equation.