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.
Maybe Spotify should take all those bad actors that are creating playlists with fake bot streams and ban them from the platform. This way, artists can avoid getting hit with takedowns. These disreputable scammers, of which I get several emails a month from, tout their playlists as a way to get more streams. Of course, the only way you can get on their playlists is payola. Their playlists only have “followers” numbered in the hundreds to about 1,500. Spotify claims it’s user base is about 600 million. So the scammers have almost no reach. Unless their playlist is focused on a specific genre, which they never are, the possibility of gaining true fans is a pipe dream.
And also it’s well know that the major labels use bot farms to create streams that inflate their artists reach. 600 million “users”? That’s up from 180 million a couple of years ago. How much of that 420 million are real people? Why doesn’t Spotify clean up it’s “user” base? Because they get revenues from those bots.
It’s past time to have an outside organization audit Spotify. That way, artists can get paid for actual streams instead of reying on Spotify policing itself, which it has shown it cannot do by itself.
When I choose to amplify my dislike of Spotify on social media, I always get pushback from Spotify fanbois who dispute my statements. One such statement is the fact that Spotify claims to pay creators 70% of revenues, which is an absolute falsehood. Spotify pays out out of revenues approximately 62% of gross revenues. Then the fanbois state that the music business pays out 70% of revenues. This 70% includes various minimum payments to big labels and, from what I understand, payments to the big 3 includes payments to those labels for allowing Spotify to carry those labels artists.
For anybody not privileged to sign to a major label, things aren’t so great. Based on the information gleaned from Spotify’s website and app, the average artist is getting the shaft. Advertising rates they publish state that the contracted advertising rate for artists looking to promote on Spotify is $1.50 to $3.50 per thousand impressions. For consumers on Spotify’s “ free” plan, they must plan to have anywhere from 3 to 5 ads played per song listened to. I’ve come up with this observation from statistics for ad insertions over a 3 year period. Using average numbers, this means Spotify makes from “free” subscribers about $.012 per song.
As of the latest numbers from DistroKid, my distributor, Spotify is paying $.0032 per song play. I don’t what math you’ve taken, but .0032/.012 is not 70%, but 26 2/3%. I have no idea whether paid subscribers, which according the 20-F form Spotify is required to file with SEC, amount to 236 million individuals have an equal participation rate, but the numbers just don’t add up. By the way, the same 20-F says Spotify has a total of 600 million subscribers, so the vast majority of subscribers are “free” ones.
Well, once again, Spotify has been caught lying. Today’s listener statistics is a classic example. Spotify gives you stats daily, but today is more egregious than usual. Listener stats vary by 33% depending on whether the stats are by country or by city. If they can’t decide what to report on, I wonder how accurate their play stats are? Are they purposely underreporting those numbers too?
Underreporting plays stats would be a windfall for a company that can’t even manage to make a profit, cutting their losses to deceive their investors.
Maybe artists need to band together and force constant audits of Spotify’s books. Maybe that should be what https://weareumaw.org/ needs to do.
Bought a couple of pieces of gear from Playtronica. Just got shipped. Can’t wait until they arrive. I hope to be able to make some new music with the Touchme and Playtron. Also bought a few accessories to go with these devices. Time will tell whether I’ll release music made with them.
Well, my first real glitch on Hostinger. Tried to upgrade plugins and the site crashed. Took a few tries in the support area to figure the plugin that caused the problem. Had to delete two plugins but was only able to reinstall one of them. At least the site’s back up.
