Seven top tips to help bands who are just starting out earn enough to keep going - from advice on streaming to sourcing your own merch
"England is mine and it owes me a living" sang Morrissey. Leaving aside the intricacies of that debate, one thing is for sure: not only does the music business not owe anybody a living, in general it ain't ever going to provide one.
This blog has been kicking around as a draft for some time. A terrific recent Substack post by Damon Krukowski (erstwhile drummer of the excellent Galaxie 500) on Spotify's use of nuanced language to justify their nefarious practices, inspired us to complete it. Read it in full, it may make you weep with impotent rage.
So what of the World's biggest streaming platform? As Krukowski notes: "it pays average royalties of 1/3 a cent per stream; it engages in payola and other undisclosed manipulations of both consumers and content providers; and it evades regulation with every tool at its disposal, including legal disputes meant to delay rulings already made against it.
"In 2020, Spotify was celebrated throughout the music industry as a solution to its problems. Today the three tenets of Justice at Spotify are widely accepted as fact – Spotify doesn’t pay fairly, doesn’t operate fairly, and doesn’t fight fairly. Even its supporters now acknowledge these truths."
Here are the stark numbers which Spotify's own obfuscation can't hide:
12 million artists uploaded music to Spotify last year.
About 2.3% generated $1,000 or more in royalties
Around 0.6% generated $10,000 or more in royalties.
Any track with less than 1000 streams a year is demonetised
Two further key takeaways from the article are as follows:
Even though Spotify claim they are a music retailer "you can’t purchase music from Spotify, even with a paid subscription, regardless of whatever they charge, you can’t take music off the platform, and you can’t save it or hear it elsewhere should you cancel your plan"
"Spotify may pay whatever billions it claims to the music industry, but it pays $0 directly to artists. Zero." Even if streaming royalties apply to a track, they are distributed to the artist via a record label or an aggregator (DistroKid, CD Baby etc) and they take their own significant cut.
After the rageful weeping what next? Don't waste your time and energy railing against billionaire would-otherwise-have-been-incels. Do what bands have done ever since there have been bands - ignore the big players and go DIY. Here are our seven top tips to destress streaming and monetise your merch (streaming equivalents assume a payout of 0.3c per stream)
Reframe your expectations. Spotify is not a payment plan, it's a promotional device. Use it to your own advantage but avoid any concept that it will pay you useful money. Unfortunately it also seems to be increasingly the case that radio producers will look at a band's monthly numbers as part of their decision process on whether to air a track.
Make sure your music is on Apple - yes they are still tech bro tossers but at least people can buy and download your tracks on their platform. One 99c track purchase is worth about 330 Spotify streams.
Get both your digital and physical items on Bandcamp. Again it's not the perfect platform (they take 15% on digital items, 10% on physical goods and a payment processing fee) but you get about 80-85% of the purchase price paid directly to you. Also Bandcamp aficionados are dedicated and will hunt down new music so make sure your tracks are tagged with genre and descriptions. Say you sell a digital album at €8 you will likely get around €6.40 - equivalent to about 2100 Spotify streams.
T shirts. Incredibly popular and a great marketing tool with your band name plastered on the human form. Costs vary widely depending on which company you go with but a good quality, ethically sourced t shirt printed in 1 or 2 colours is likely to be around €11 per shirt. Sold for €20 at a gig that's branding heaven and with a profit equal to around 3000 streams.
CDs. Still popular and relatively cheap to produce. Top tip - when you are getting your album or EP mastered ask the engineer to make you a DDP file at the same time. That's the audio file which the CD production facility will need. Depending on how many you produce, costs can be as low as €1.50 per CD. If you sell on the merch stand at a gig for €10 that gives you €8.50 per CD - the same as 2800 streams.
Vinyl. The holy grail for many bands but a word of caution. Despite the many articles hailing that vinyl is back, new bands will not sell as many as they might think. The pricing structure at pressing plants incentivises higher numbers (minimum quantity is usually 100 - the cost for 200 may only be €150 more) - but do you want to be left with 100 records? Let's say a first run of 150 averages out at €14 per record. An album will sell at €25 so not only will you have a beautiful physical artefact, every sale on the merch stand equates to around 3700 streams.
Whenever you sell something to a real human get their contact details! A database of people who like you enough to spend their hard earned money on your music or merch is an absolute goldmine.
We always happy to answer questions about getting started with merch - email us if you would like help. We can also recommend companies we have used for CDs, vinyl records and t shirts.
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