Why are you streaming your music?
If you’re a great musician, you make almost nothing from streaming your music. Hell, even if you’re an excellent musician, you probably make almost nothing. So you can’t be doing it for the money. You’re doing it for the…
- Ego. Your ego. Fame, notoriety, or whatever. “I have music on…” you say to your friends and family, and it makes you feel good. Nothing wrong with that.
- Looks. It looks better if you have music streaming, you know, to your colleagues, contemporaries, other musicians. Also, ego-related, but again, nothing wrong with that.
Now, this above is me talking to myself. I asked myself why I was streaming my music, and those were the answers I came up with. Maybe those aren’t good enough reasons to be streaming.
But I thought more, and this time with more focus on getting a good “why.”
Is the ego thing bad? Maybe, yes. Ego is the enemy of progress, I hear.
“Ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”
Ryan Holiday
So, without ego, why would I stream my music? Some other good reasons could be these…
- As a marketing tool, I want to get my music out to many more people who otherwise would not be able to hear it from a single source, such as a CD, Bandcamp, etc.
- I tried to list more, but the answers all seem to go back to “as a marketing tool.”
Okay, so streaming is advertising, basically, for me. And that is absolutely perfect because I don’t expect to make a lot of (any) money from streaming; instead, I want to be known and heard so people can dig deeper to find me. So, it is important to have my streaming funnel people who are doing that digging in the direction I want them to go.
But which way is that? Right now, it is toward my Bandcamp page, which offers digital downloads paid directly to me. Even if it is $1, that is money in my pocket and more than I can make on streaming right now. I can offer physical goods (CDs, etc.) there on Bandcamp, too, so maybe this can be an option.
Well, that’s really all I have to say about streaming. I think it can be good for the small musician if used in the right ways and I’m still trying to decide which ways those are.