So Streaming music?

[0175westwood29]

who uses what platforms?

 

Anyone had any success, im hitting a wall of both fustration and now turning into anger, nothing you do as a smaller band with out paying goes anywhere, sites like spotify ignore, Apple really dont offer any metric so we have gone for a more random approch of starting to use Soundcloud now aswell.

 

we listen to all the podcasts which are meant to help and im sure they are all a simple push to get you to spend money pushing on ads in spotify etc, ive talked to local bands around us and they simly say they started by just streaming there stuff themselves to start the alg, honestly that just doesnt seem right to me.

[asingardenof]

I mostly listen to Spotify, but if there's a particular band I want to give real cash money to I use Bandcamp.

[Stofferson]

Just now, asingardenof said:

I mostly listen to Spotify, but if there's a particular band I want to give real cash money to I use Bandcamp.

Yeah, same

[Doctor J]

I've bought the music I like since I was a teenager and have some fairly niche stuff as a result. Why pay some suit to stream what I already own and some of it doesn't feature on any streaming service anyway? I've ripped everything I own losslessly and bought a large capacity phone to have much of it with me whenever I want to listen to it. 

 

Having music on Spotify like many on here (because I found it was ending up there anyway, even though I hadn't uploaded it there), and seeing what they pay artists as a result, I would wonder where the bulk of my monthly fee was going, since it isn't going to the people who made the music I listen to. I choose not to support Spotify with my money, as a result. If I want to hear anything without buying a physical product, I'll buy it off Bandcamp. Foooook Spotify.

[BigRedX]

To the OP what are you doing to promote your music?

[0175westwood29]

15 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

To the OP what are you doing to promote your music?

And here I guess is the main part, we post and engage on fb/insta when we are writing or doing anything cool or worthy of posting, we are playing decent home town shows, looking to play more next year but we have kids and I’m a single dad with two kids so can’t go touring etc 

 

we use YouTube to promote our videos and have dipped a toe In to TikTok (we don’t wanna do any silly viral memes tho) 

 

we’ve done fb boosts and Instagram stuff never really gets any real input for the money we put in, 

 

we get frustrated as sometimes it seems it’s more who you know that pushes you out rather than what you realise 

[Rosie C]

1 hour ago, 0175westwood29 said:

who uses what platforms?

 

Anyone had any success,

 

Not personally, but the mandolin player in our band has just hit 1.8M streams for his ancient Greek music on Spotify. As far as I understand, it's hit a sweet spot with some of the "algorithms" and is being pushed out to new listeners automatically.

 

 

[BigRedX]

You need to be posting something interesting on the major Social Media platforms at least a couple of times a week in order to keep your profile up.

 

Also you have a ready-made audience on here, so why not use it? Put links to your Bandcamp page, and/or wherever else your music is available in your signature (but keep the overall signature small or a lot of people here will hide it making it useless). Having a link to your music in each of your posts should also boost those pages visibility to search engines.

[0175westwood29]

4 hours ago, BigRedX said:

You need to be posting something interesting on the major Social Media platforms at least a couple of times a week in order to keep your profile up.

 

Also you have a ready-made audience on here, so why not use it? Put links to your Bandcamp page, and/or wherever else your music is available in your signature (but keep the overall signature small or a lot of people here will hide it making it useless). Having a link to your music in each of your posts should also boost those pages visibility to search engines.

thats def an idea i hadnt thought of tbh!

 

and the social media i guess is actually growing a little over the last 5 or so months.

[NancyJohnson]

As covered elsewhere, dumped regular hifi many moons ago and went the Sonos route; audio is being delivered from Spotify and FLAC files on a NAS.  I have no issue spaffing £10+ a month on a premium subscription considering I'd spend £100+ a month on CDs in the past.

 

(Honestly getting tired of the rhetoric about Spotify revenue to artistes, the real money has come from touring and merchandise for decades now.  I don't expect to be paid in perpetuity for contract work I did 20 years ago, so why should music be any different?)

[BillyBass]

25 minutes ago, NancyJohnson said:

As covered elsewhere, dumped regular hifi many moons ago and went the Sonos route; audio is being delivered from Spotify and FLAC files on a NAS.  I have no issue spaffing £10+ a month on a premium subscription considering I'd spend £100+ a month on CDs in the past.

I got a free three month trial with Deezer when I bought some Sonos stuff years ago.  I just kept the subscription (they got me).  I pay a yearly subscription to Deezer and its pretty cheap.  I mainly use it to play along to songs my band covers.

[NancyJohnson]

8 minutes ago, BillyBass said:

I got a free three month trial with Deezer when I bought some Sonos stuff years ago.  I just kept the subscription (they got me).  I pay a yearly subscription to Deezer and its pretty cheap.  I mainly use it to play along to songs my band covers.

 

I'd say most of our day to day Spotify listening is off a huge 115 hour(!) playlist, although this will move to our 'Christmas Crooners' list (29 hours) shortly. 

 

There's dozens and dozens of playlists that I've set up for individual artistes, but there's always going to be stuff I have that's not on Spotify (viz. the full XTC or Jellyfish catalogue), so the NAS is utilised there.

[SumOne]

Short songs that jump straight into the hook/chorus and fit in with popular playlist choices (e.g. 'relaxing work music', 'gym music', 'house party') are apparently a good way to go if you want streams.

 

But then again, you don't get much money from streams so I wouldn't bother too much myself if money was my aim  - other than using it a means to promote yourself (like radio) and then make money through merchandise or live gigs or getting your music licensed for games or tv.

 

I'd try and go with management/small record label that put expertise into promo/marketing, or Bandcamp and social media of you want to try and make money directly through selling music. 

[BigRedX]

If you want to make money out of your music, then playing live is the way to go. 

 

Even if your actual gig-fee isn't that great you'll be able to sell band merchandise. Unfortunately the sad truth is that T-shirts are by far the best earner for a band. Punters seem to be perfectly happy to pay £10-£15 for a band logo printed on a black T-Shirt that probably cost about £5 each to produce, but will hesitate over paying the same for your album in CD or vinyl where you may have spent several thousands of pounds on recording, mastering and actual production.

 

Also if your not gigging your streaming and on-line sales revenue will decrease too. Case in point, while The Terrortones were out there playing almost ever weekend we would normally sell a couple of CDs or vinyl between each gig to people who most likely had run out of money to spend at the end of the gig. Were were also getting $10-$20 a month from downloads and streaming. Once the band stopped gigging our on-line sales and streaming dropped off fairly rapidly to the point were now despite our past popularity I only sell a couple of singles or albums a year and it takes over 12 months for our download and streaming revenue to pass the $10 threshold to trigger a payout.

[0175westwood29]

18 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

If you want to make money out of your music, then playing live is the way to go. 

 

Even if your actual gig-fee isn't that great you'll be able to sell band merchandise. Unfortunately the sad truth is that T-shirts are by far the best earner for a band. Punters seem to be perfectly happy to pay £10-£15 for a band logo printed on a black T-Shirt that probably cost about £5 each to produce, but will hesitate over paying the same for your album in CD or vinyl where you may have spent several thousands of pounds on recording, mastering and actual production.

 

Also if your not gigging your streaming and on-line sales revenue will decrease too. Case in point, while The Terrortones were out there playing almost ever weekend we would normally sell a couple of CDs or vinyl between each gig to people who most likely had run out of money to spend at the end of the gig. Were were also getting $10-$20 a month from downloads and streaming. Once the band stopped gigging our on-line sales and streaming dropped off fairly rapidly to the point were now despite our past popularity I only sell a couple of singles or albums a year and it takes over 12 months for our download and streaming revenue to pass the $10 threshold to trigger a payout.

Oh for sure playing out will generate more interest, we’re at a point where we can’t and don’t want to gig every week, also want to play to decent crowds which playing once a month allows us to do, 

 

we do ok on merch, not looking to make a lot on money but simply get our music into more ears online, ie we’ve had a few plays on bbc introducing, but it’s the smaller local station however I know a few bands who have bypassed this step due to who they know…..hence why I’m not the biggest fan on bbc intro

[BigRedX]

On 09/12/2023 at 13:25, 0175westwood29 said:

we do ok on merch, not looking to make a lot on money but simply get our music into more ears online, ie we’ve had a few plays on bbc introducing, but it’s the smaller local station however I know a few bands who have bypassed this step due to who they know…..hence why I’m not the biggest fan on bbc intro

 

Who you know is always key, but I have found that you get to "know" more people by making your band more visible - by networking and promotion. It's a sad fact that getting on the BBC these days means having music that appeals to one of their "gatekeepers" and if they simply don't like you or think your music isn't a good fit then there's nothing you can do about that until your band becomes a lot more famous to the point where they can no longer ignore you. However I have found that they will take you more seriously if you actually put out our music on a physical format like CD or vinyl. After all anyone with some audio files and $50 can get a "album" out on all the major download and streaming services, so just having something on-line isn't really that impressive any more.

 

If you are serious about upping you Spotify plays then you need to get your songs on some decent Spotify playlists. Unfortunately there are no real shortcuts and it will involve a lot of hard work doing research and pitching your songs to the most appropriate playlists, and even then you'll still need a bit of luck. One of my bands recently managed to get a song on a very popular Goth playlist which means that it now gets over 50 plays a day and as a result of this the listening numbers for the rest of our catalogue are slowly increasing. However this was the result of several months of hard work identifying appropriate playlists and then having the right song to pitch to them.