As some of you may already know, I released an album earlier this year, which I’m really proud of. This post isn’t a sales pitch but in case you’re interested you can listen to it or buy it (or both) here.
I recently received a very exciting email letting me know that I had received some payment for sales through my digital distribution agency. It’s always a validating and vindicating experience to know that I’m receiving payment for my artistic efforts. In this case, I received roughly $70… so while we’re not talking huge numbers, this email was met with genuine excitement.
In fact, I was pretty chuffed to have received such a large payment based on the anecdotal assumption of how much payment is attached to one sale/stream in today’s digital music marketplace. So, with a spring in my step, I ventured online to check my sales report and performance numbers. What I saw next was equally depressing and hilarious… actually, probably more hilarious.
I sell my music in three ways. Firstly, I sell vinyl records – shiny black discs that have been beautifully crafted and sound wonderful. Secondly, I sell my music (either digitally or on vinyl) through Bandcamp – these guys are AWESOME!!! I have never met a musician who doesn’t love Bandcamp. In every way imagineable, they’re the best service for digital delivery of music. More on them later. Thirdly, I somewhat begrudgingly have my music distributed by CD Baby, which allows the music to be included on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Google Music Store, Deezer, Pandora, etc. I appreciate that many people only access music through iTunes and Spotify, so I’m happy that they’re able to access it, but it’s not exactly a mutually beneficial partnership between CD Baby and me. Anyway, the payment that I talked about before was from CD Baby.
Examining my sales report, I saw that I have had 319 total streams/downloads of my album through CD Baby’s distribution. That makes me really happy! I’m totally appreciative of anyone listening to/purchasing my music. For those streams/downloads, I received $43.70 in payments, which works out to roughly 1.4 cents per play/download. That’s OK, I can handle that.
Oh yes… a warning: there’ll be some numbers below. I’m a bit of a numbers person. You can skip ahead if you don’t like numbers!
Poring over my stats a little more, I came across one payment that was slightly less than the average. It was from one of the streaming services listed above for a payment of $0.00000879 (yes, five (5) zeros – that’s not a typo). This equates to 0.000879 cents for the streaming of one song from the album. That means:
- 1 cent of revenue = 1,138 streams.
- 1 dollar of revenue = 113,800 streams.
- 1 cup of coffee = 432,400 streams.
- Shared coffee experience with my lovely wife = 864,400 streams.
The population of Adelaide, my hometown, is 1,345,000. If everyone in Adelaide streamed the track, I would earn roughly $11.80.
Anyway, I think you can see my point. We live in an age of immense convenience – we can listen to anything so quickly and easily and not feel guilty about it because we know that the artists are receiving their streaming royalties. But as you can see, we’re not.
Enter Bandcamp.
Bandcamp is an amazing service that allows for artists to be in control of their digital content. As much as any online distribution centre can be your friend, Bandcamp is the artist’s digital BFFL. Through digital sales on bandcamp, the artist receives 79.5% of the money. They also provide opportunities for engagement with the audience through integrating all sorts of wonderful features, which enable me to hopefully engage with you on a more personal level.
This post is not meant to bash the other streaming services. If you listen to your music on Apple Music or Spotify, that’s OK. If you purchase music through iTunes or Google Music, way to go, you’re supporting artists through buying their music. But…
Can I encourage you to make the switch to Bandcamp.
You can still stream the album to see if you like it. You’ll pay no more (in fact, you’ll probably pay less) and the artist will receive a much greater share in the payment so they can keep creating new music for you to listen to. As I said, most musicians and artists I know aren’t solely in the ‘business’ to make money but it helps to receive a little bit of payment from time to time.
Thanks so much for reading this. If you’d like to be a part of what I’m doing, please join my mailing list.
Oh yeah… In order to receive the payment that I started out this blog post with, I had to pay a $2 processing fee… I’ll let you do the math.
