There was a time when getting your music “out there” meant something very physical.
You had to make a CD. Or a tape, if we are going back far enough and trying not to think about how old that makes us feel. You needed something that could be held, copied, posted, handed to someone at a gig, left on a table, sold from a bag, or pushed into the hands of a friend with the words, “Have a listen when you get a chance.”
That phrase, of course, usually meant, “Please listen to this immediately and tell me it has changed your life.”
These days, the world is different. My music is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and the usual streaming services. That sentence still feels slightly ridiculous to me. I can sit at home, write a song, record it, send the stems to be worked on properly, get it finished, release it, and then someone, somewhere, can find it on the same platforms where they listen to the biggest artists in the world.
That is astonishing.
It is also slightly terrifying.
For amateur musicians, streaming is both a miracle and a problem. It has removed one of the biggest barriers that used to stand between the songwriter and the listener. You no longer need a record deal. You no longer need a van full of CDs. You no longer need to persuade a shop to stock your album or a radio station to play your single. With the right distributor, you can get your songs onto global platforms and say, quite truthfully, “My music is available worldwide.”
That is the blessing.
The curse is that so is everyone else’s.
Streaming has given independent musicians access to the world, but it has also placed us in the world’s busiest room. It is like being handed a microphone at Wembley Stadium, then discovering that every other person in the stadium has also been handed a microphone, and all of them are currently singing, shouting, promoting, releasing, uploading, remixing, reacting and asking people to pre-save their new single.
Somewhere in the middle of that, you are quietly saying, “I’ve written a song.”
This is the strange contradiction of modern music-making. It has never been easier to release music, and it has never been harder to be heard.
I do not say that bitterly. I think it is important to be honest about it. For someone like me, streaming is not a road to superstardom. It is not a magic machine that takes a finished song and returns fame, money and a tasteful documentary series. It is a way of making music available. It is a way of saying, “Here it is. It exists. You can listen if you want to.”
And that matters.
There is a particular satisfaction in seeing your songs appear on the same services you use to listen to music yourself. It makes the work feel real. A song that began as a few chords and an idea in a room at home suddenly has a title, artwork, a release date and a place in the world. It sits there, neatly listed, waiting for someone to press play.
Of course, the waiting is where things get complicated.
When you release music now, you can see things. That is both useful and dangerous. You can check streams, listeners, saves, follows, plays and all sorts of little numbers that appear to offer insight but may actually be designed to drive musicians slowly mad. In the old days, you might not know whether someone had played your CD unless they told you. Now you can watch the tiniest flickers of activity and start constructing entire emotional narratives around them.
One stream? A breakthrough.
No streams? Clearly the end of Western civilisation.
Three streams in Germany? International success.
The problem with numbers is that they look more important than they are. They have a cold authority. A song may mean a great deal to you, but the streaming dashboard does not care about that. It simply shows what happened. Sometimes that is encouraging. Sometimes it is sobering. Sometimes it is just confusing.
But numbers do not tell the whole story.
A song can matter to one person. That sounds like the sort of thing people say to console themselves, but it is true. If someone hears a song and connects with it, even quietly, even without telling you, that still matters. Music has never only been about scale. It is about connection. Streaming can make that connection possible, but it cannot guarantee it.
That is where social media enters the picture, usually wearing a hi-vis jacket and holding a clipboard.
Releasing a song is no longer just releasing a song. It becomes a small campaign. You announce it. You share the link. You post the artwork. You remind people. You try to say the same thing in slightly different ways so you do not sound like a man standing in the street shouting, “Please listen to me” into a traffic cone.
This is not always easy, especially for amateur musicians. Many of us are comfortable writing songs but less comfortable promoting ourselves. There is a difference between believing in a song and repeatedly asking people to give it their attention. One feels creative. The other can feel like knocking on a door that may or may not open.
And yet, without social media, how would anyone know the song exists?
That is the other side of the argument. Streaming makes the music available, but social media often gives it a chance of being noticed. The two are tied together now. The song lives on Spotify, Apple or Amazon, but the invitation to listen usually happens somewhere else — Facebook, Instagram, X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, a website, an email, a conversation, a post that may or may not be seen by more than seven people and a bot offering to increase your reach.
This can be tiring. It can also be surprisingly rewarding.
Every so often, someone responds. Someone listens. Someone says they liked a lyric, or a chorus, or the feel of a track. Someone remembers a song you thought had vanished into the digital fog. Those moments are small, but they are not nothing. For an amateur musician, they can be the fuel that keeps the whole thing going.
The blessing of streaming is that the door is open.
The curse is that the room beyond the door is enormous, noisy and almost impossible to navigate.
Still, I would rather have the door open.
Without streaming, many of my songs would simply sit on a hard drive, or exist only in my own memory. Instead, they are out there. They may not be troubling the upper reaches of the charts, or indeed the lower reaches, or possibly even the basement car park beneath the charts, but they exist. They can be found. They can be played. They have been given a chance.
That is worth something.
For me, streaming has become part of the modern amateur musician’s bargain. You accept the tiny numbers, the crowded platforms, the endless competition and the occasional feeling that you are throwing songs into space. In return, you get possibility. Not certainty. Not fame. Not riches. Possibility.
Someone might hear it.
That may sound modest, but it is not a small thing.
After all, most songs start in private. A few chords. A melody. A line written down before it escapes. The journey from that first idea to a finished track on a streaming service is still remarkable, however ordinary technology has made it seem.
So yes, streaming is a blessing and a curse.
It gives amateur musicians a place in the world and then reminds us how very large the world is. It makes our music available to everyone, while guaranteeing that everyone is busy listening to something else. It offers opportunity without attention, access without certainty and statistics without mercy.
But it also allows a song written in a spare room to travel further than it ever could have done before.
And for now, that is enough reason to keep pressing release.
You can listen to my music on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and the usual streaming services, or explore more of my songs and albums here on my website.