Month: April 2024

It seems that Spotiy’s threat to defund smaller artists didn’t come to pass. I just got paid for my February streams on Spotify. Not much but every little bit counts. I still direct my listeners to other platforms as payouts on other platforms are 25 to 2000% better. The Spotify payout is now down to $.0027 per stream, even Apple does better at $.004 per stream. Spotify’s payout is down fron $.0043 per stream 4 years ago, a 38% decrease by my reckoning. Beatport pays $.08 per stream. I now get significant streams from 18 streaming services. That’s all for now. Stay tuned.

Well, I’ve broken the million impression milestone! To be precise, as of a couple of minutes ago, SoundCloud and DistroKid report 1,000,354 impressions. Impressions are a combination of streams and sales, so some impressions pay better than others. Of course, DistroKid’s share is platforms generally reporting impressions 3 to 4 months in arrears, so the million impression mark was passed months ago. Since I don’t know the numbers until DistroKid reports them and I get access to the money I earned, I’m not sure of the numbers until they’re reported.

Here’s the breakdown. The 842,140 is DistroKid’s reported number and the 158,214 is SoundCloud’s share.

As the title suggests, I’m about ready to break a recorded milestone. 1,000,000 impressions. I count impressions as streams and/or album or track sales. In the picture below the first number, 156,435, is the total streams on SoundCloud. The second number, 838,481, is impressions from today’s DistroKid report. DistroKid only gives data when the platforms send out data, which is generally a 3-4 month delay. So I’ve undoubtedly broken the 1,000,000 mark a couple of months ago.

Well, it took them a while to do it but Beatport finally added my newest album, Remixes Vol 3, to one of their charts. As you can see in the image below, the album currently is placing in the high 60s on that chart. I wouldn’t mind if it placed higher, but considering it hasn’t charted anywhere else, I’ll take what I can get.

Beatport has been getting my releases since 2021 and this is the first one to chart there.

Beatport is a platform that seems to cater to the DJ community, which is the reason a lot of you have never heard of it. They do streaming and track and album sales. The sales part is unlike other platforms in the way they serve up content. The default is to download mp3 files, but, for an extra fee, you can download wav and, I think, flac files. So if you’re an audiophile, the higher quality files are a boon.

Has anyone else seen this kind of activity on their creator accounts on YouTube? I get mostly slow but almost imperceptible gains, then all of a sudden I get negative plays. The plays drop by 20-30 streams.

It wouldn’t surprise me that big business would stoop to this fraudulent behavior, after all, making money, especially the big bucks Google makes, means you have engage in immoral behavior. On top of it all, Google just announced a price increase for YouTube Red, their premium service. So they’re pimping both the creators and their customers. What a scam!

My shadowbanning has continued on InstaGram , as it has for the past few months. Meta declared that it wasn’t going to promote political or social justice posts, but it seems that even comments which don’t suit Meta are included. I keep my posts mostly about my musical endeavors, but Meta has been warning me about my comments on other peoples posts. This is even though if you have a sufficiently right-wing bias, you’re entitled to make inflammatory comments. Meta has turned into another right-wing echo chamber, just as Twittr has.

Well, DistroKid stats are in for March 2024, and things are looking up. I got paid for plays on 18 different platforms, and almost 30,000 impressions. This is from 45 different countries. The pay I got wasn’t as good as some months, but some money is better than none. Facebook/IG was a big contributor. And this is for plays averaging 3-4 months ago.

One thing that surprised me is that Spotify’s numbers were from Jan 2024, and I’m still getting money from them. I thought that they were going to cut me off. Although their contribution was small, I’m not expecting anything nice from them. With their attitude towards smaller artists, I have been steering my potential listeners to other platforms with payouts of 25-600% higher than Spotify. So that this month, Spotify contributes to less than 5% of total impressions. Their loss is someone else’s gain.

The support I get from my listeners gives me the incentive to put out more music. I just wish I had more stats about what they listen to and where they’re from. According to stats from Spotify, most of my listeners are male, though I don’t know which music reverberates with who.