"I want you to stream me"
Thoughts
Just finished reading a really interesting article from "Ghostly Beard". He's a good friend of mine and an amazingly talented artist and we have a lot in common but also have some big disagreements.
- "I confess that I’m affected by a rare new disease, and I’m afraid it’s incurable. It started developing when I realized how much streaming platforms were the true enemy of indie music and artists."
So since I'm a big fan advocate of streaming I felt the urge to write my thoughts about it and why I think they are more of a benefit for independent artists then they are an enemy.
For me, nothing is black and white, and streaming has it pro's and it has it's con's. Spotify and similar services where born because there was a demand for easy accessible music and at the same time artists and companies wanted to get paid for their music. In the late 00's illegal downloading was huge (Pirate Bay, Torrenthunt etc etc) and I can admit I was using it as much as the next guy and I also used it to make my music available for the masses.
As an answer came streaming where the consumer for a small fee or by being forced to listen to commercials got access to almost all music, both mainstream and independent, old music as well as new music. Hence making illegal downloading redundant. And at the same time the artist actually gets paid something for people listening to their music, even if it's embarrassingly low per play, but still better than nothing.
To complain about the technical evolution and talking about boycotting streaming services is useless. The biggest problem is that people no longer value the work it takes to create great music and the big companies still has way to much power over the music industry. But that would be the case even if streaming didn't exist.
My way of tackling it as an independent artist is by using streaming as one means of spreading my music to new listeners but not totally rely on it. I interact directly with people on Twitter and Facebook and when people ask where they can listen to my music I can direct them either to my homepage or YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud or whatever suits them best. And my experience is that 75 % of the people prefer Spotify and so I provide them with my music on Spotify.
And as a big consumer of independent music if someone tells me the only way to listen to their music is via Bandcamp I will most certainly skip it since it's too much of a hustle instead of just getting a link to their latest EP on Spotify and I can then listen to it wherever I go, be it in the car, at work, at home etc. And if there is an artist I really like I actually prefer to buy a physical record from them instead of paying 10 dollars for a download.
So to sum it up. I think as an independent artist it's important to choose your road and in what way you wanna spread your music to the world and then build your strategy from that. But the most important thing is to interact and create a experience for your fans. And leaving out a big part of the potential fan base by boycotting streaming services is in my opinion both contra productive and will in no way make the world a better place for independent artists.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://www.jonmagnusson.se/2017/11/18/i-want-you-to-stream-me/