0 voters
so i was thinking… if i wanna make money off of my music, i should put them on spotify… but if i made it available on soundcloud too people would naturally go there instead since it’s free to listen there. then again, if i put it only on spotify there’s the danger that it won’t get any plays… let me know what you think would work better.
How would you make money off of spotify?
You can use Amuse to put your music in stores everywhere for free and keep 100% of your royalties. I use it myself. 
I use it too, but how would you make money? It’s not like anyone pays to listen to your music on spotify.
iirc Spotify pays the artists that use the platform to release their music a (miniscule) percentage of the total money that comes from streaming their songs.
streams = tiny tiny bit of money
yeah you’ll probably only get $1
Here’s an infographic that I found on theguardian.com (it’s old - updated in April 2015)
(updated thx akabill)
What does that even mean?
lmao who tryna help me hit 1,000,000 plays on a song 
I think it would be a good idea only if you can make enough songs to put a couple Spotify exclusive. Like for me, I have been slow recently on dropping new songs so it wouldn’t be a great idea because I wouldn’t be able to provide for both. And I would want to spend a month on a song just for it to get only a couple views on Spotify.
What it means is how much each method of music distribution is worth investing in as a musician to get the most revenue. You see up the top of the graphic it says “self-distributed album CD”? That’s like standing on the path in Los Angeles and selling your music to random pedestrians (wanna check out my 
mixtape?).
I actually heard someone on disco was at a market and sold their music for 40 odd bucks. The plus is that you get all the money to yourself (i.e. no paying services to “house” your music).
After that, it shows how much each service online pays the artist for their purchases/streams. Bandcamp, for example, is quite high on the charts as a service to put your music on, as it pays a lot back to the artist, in comparison to, say, YouTube.
Oh, the picture when I first viewed it was unreadable.
It is pretty bad quality, I’ll try edit it out for better resolution, or maybe a more current/accurate representation of the music market.
You know Spotify has a Premium subscription option, right?
If you’re not a paying user, you get ads.
That’s not a streaming issue. That’s a popularity issue.
Even the major labels stated that that started getting more than 50% of their direct revenue from streaming services in late 2016.
The biggest earners these days are gigs and merchandise.
It likely mostly refers to things like CDs sold via Bandcamp, which are still classed as ‘self-distributed’. Bandcamp just helps take the order and process the payment.
Of course, you could sell via your own website too. There are plenty of ecommerce options available.
No need. A Google image lookup…
One key thing to notice about what the graphic tells you…
It’s generally not worth signing up with a label unless they can at least double your streams/sales - which any decent label should be able to do.
It’s not ultimately about percentages, it’s about whether being on that label actually puts more money in your pocket.
Little story…
I was recently ‘offered’ the opportunity by a music producer vlogger (known to some here) to sign one of my tracks on one of their labels.
Problem was, it would cost me money, it would be a 10-year contract and there was no mixing, mastering or promotion being offered - other than inclusion on the lable’s Bandcamp page (tiny following) and the label’s Spotify playlist with fewer than 1500 followers. I would keep 100% of all revenue.
It effectively boiled down to me paying to get one track up on the usual channels and be included in one small playlist*. I would need to handle all other promotion myself.
I passed.
(* Paid inclusion/promotion on prominent playlists is part of the game these days. But in this case, I wasn’t convinced that the cost represented a good investment. I considered doing it out of curiosity, but the 10-year contract spooked me - though I didn’t bother asking to see the contract itself before declining.)
Btw, I voted Yes, but that was to mean that you should consider releasing a track exclusively on proper streaming services and other channels that generate a per-play revenue.
