Is popular music getting worse?: Working musicians

$4,000 for a million streams

I released an album last year. Twelve songs. Took me two years to write, four months to record. My best track hit 200,000 streams. That earned me about $800 before the distributor’s cut. After the cut: roughly $560. My studio time cost $3,200.

The declinists are arguing about chord counts. The discovery optimists are celebrating that I can reach listeners in 61 countries. The structural analysts are mapping the incentives. I am trying to figure out how to make next month’s rent from the thing I have spent my entire adult life learning to do.

The math nobody wants to say out loud

A song needs 250,000 streams to earn $1,000. To make a living — say, $40,000 a year — you need about ten million streams annually. Or you tour. Touring means driving a van, sleeping on floors, playing to rooms of forty people, selling merch at a folding table. The merch is where the money is. Not the music. The t-shirt.

The people whose livelihoods depend on this understand something the argument misses: the question is not whether music is getting better or worse. The question is whether making music remains a viable way to live. If it does not, the pipeline that produces the next Stevie Wonder or Mdou Moctar dries up — not because talent disappeared but because talented people chose careers that pay rent.

I shorten my songs. I front-load the hook. I hate it. I do it because the algorithm rewards it and I need to eat. The structural analysts are right about the incentives. They are describing my Tuesday.

Where we concede ground: We made this deal. Nobody forced us onto Spotify. The access is real and we benefit from it even as it underpays us.

What would change our mind: If streaming revenue per artist doubled without reducing the number of artists reaching audiences.

Read the full synthesis: Is popular music getting worse?