In the last few days I’ve had the great pleasure of posting about two of my songs reaching the milestone of 1,000 streams each on Spotify, but why does that matter?
The world of music has changed massively. No longer does it deal in physical products like records, cassettes and CDs, instead everything, or virtually everything, is digital. Music is ‘stored’ on your phone, your tablet, your PC.
Also, just about every song you can think about is now available to you 24/7 with just a few clicks.
We never had this when I was a lad. Back then you collected music as a physical product. In my case vinyl singles and albums. And they cost quite a bit of money so you chose your listening pleasure carefully and treated it with respect.
These days streaming services like Spotify make the entire world of music available to you. There’s no need to collect music, the most you might do is compile playlists.
On top of this around 60,000 new songs are added to Spotify every day. That’s around 420,000 every week. Or 21,840,000 every year. And that rolls on year after year. It’s a mind boggling amount of music that’s being created and put in front of us a listeners and consumers.
As a result music overload starts to take effect. Music becomes less valued, to the point where consumers want their music for free and object to having to pay for it.
Leaving all those resulting issues to one side there is no doubt that there is currently one company that is dominating the world of music listening and that’s Spotify. There are literally dozens of other streaming services but the current daddy is Spotify.
So, if you’re a musician this is the platform you want to succeed on.
Spotify only starts to measure how many streams your song is getting when the number of streams reaches 1,000. As a consumer any figure below this doesn’t register. Whilst the biggest artists can measure their streams in the millions and billions for each song we lesser mortals struggle to make our voices heard in the cacophony of 60,000 songs being uploaded every day. Just reaching 1,000 streams is therefore a big deal. It indicates you might be doing something right.
But, and it’s a very big BUT, don’t get fooled. You can actually buy Spotify streams. I see artists doing it all the time. Out of the blue a song will have 30,000, 40,000 or more streams so it looks like it’s a really popular song. That might be true, it might also be that the artist concerned has boosted their numbers by buying streams.
I’m pleased to say I haven’t done that and I won’t. What you see is what you get, it’s what I’ve achieved by working hard to promote my music.
Meanwhile, thank you again and again to all of you who have streamed my music. It really matters to me and I am very, very grateful to you all. Please keep doing it.