Why Is Your Music Not on Streaming Platforms?

Several weeks had passed since the release day of Pilgrim’s Dream and as was the case with almost every previous album, the same question is still being asked:

Why is this album not available on streaming platforms?

The answer to this question is not so simple. At least not so simple as to fit in a few words.

Back in 2018, I became aware of the rising trends of streaming platforms, a tool that makes the music available to a wide majority of people, countless albums reachable within a few clicks and so on... To me, music was always about research and exploration, whether we are talking about writing music or seeking for something to listen to. Both require personal engagement, effort, time... and time is what people lack the most today and just like many things, the music has been turned into one other “instant-thing”.

I belong to the generation that did not have everything available, a generation before YouTube or even the internet. When I was a teenager, I had to search and somehow dig out the music I wished to listen to and digging out was a particularly tricky thing to do since I grew up in a country without a music shop. Seeking for the music was some sort of a hunt and once you managed to put your hands on the prey it would have felt as if the entire world was back to balance. You finally got that record you were hunting for months. That is the feeling so many people have forgotten and so many generations may never know.

Now fast forward to today and we have various phrases and mantras that musicians blindly accept as the new code, the only possible way of being a musician, of being heard: “if you are not on streaming platforms – you do not exist”, “if you are not on streaming platforms people cannot find you”, “if you want to make your music available, put it on streaming platforms”... And why is that? Because if the music is unavailable, people are not able listen to it, as I have heard many say.

Well, that is simply not true. A published music existing in a music store somewhere, or some online shop, or second-hand shop, is not unavailable. The bare fact that a piece of music, a record, has been published means that it exists. If it exists then it has to be available somewhere. Describing a song or an album, which does not exist on streaming platforms as an “unavailable” is wrong and misleading. It is a statement of the majority of modern people that expect everything to be a few clicks away in their smartphones and instead of getting up and finding the music they actually wished to listen to, they would mostly choose to listen to something else that is “available” and chosen at the moment by the software algorithm.

Some years ago, I contributed to the music project, a record, to be more precise, and right before it was published, the boss from the label stated to us, musicians, that we should be careful how much music from the album we put on the internet for free. They said, the more you give away for free the less people would buy. I could have not agreed more. However, once the record was published, the label put it on several streaming platforms.

That made no sense to me. Putting a song out for free on your own website would harm the sales and profit but putting an entire album on streaming platforms makes it sell better? No, it does not.

I am keeping a track of almost every album copy I have ever sold, both physical and digital and I can confirm, at least in my case, that the albums that exist on streaming platforms do not sell well at all. An album that is not available on streaming platforms is the one that will actually sell and make a certain profit simply because one has to buy it in order to have it.

To have it. That is one other problem with the streaming platforms. Many people think that by using streaming platforms they have all the music they will ever wish for. That is far from the truth. Buying a physical record, a CD, LP, even purchasing files makes you an owner of an actual album copy. Paying for a streaming platform’s subscription, gives you only access to a digital music database available to you at that particular moment. One day your favourite record might be there, the next day it may be unavailable. Streaming platforms and their advertisements make people believe that for ten Euros a month you have all the music there is but there is not a single song that music consumers will ever own that will be available to them forever. Now to think about all the people that replaced their entire collections of CDs and LPs with a streaming platform subscription...

Some people see streaming platforms as digital-music-rental-services. I see streaming platforms almost as “legalised” pirated music that one can find, for example, on Torrent, Rutracker and similar forums. I cannot get away from the feeling that someone who created streaming platforms was actually thinking how to monetise things like Torrent. These things work in almost exactly the same way: people upload music in order to make it available to everybody. The difference is that you cannot stream music from Torrent or Rutracker – you can only download it. You can often get better audio quality at places like Rutracker (FLACs, sometimes WAVs or even DSD masters) than on streaming platforms, where next to the artist name, song title and maybe a shiny “hi-res” badge you have zero information about the music you are listening to. You might be listening to the original high-resolution studio master as well as a ripped CD that has been up-scaled in order to get “hi-res” label, which is nothing else but a fraud. The most important difference between all those websites with pirated music and streaming platforms is that people who upload and download pirated music do not make any profit. It is illegal and a theft, many would say. Well, I do not think that piracy is a theft. It is most certainly a crime, yes, but not a theft. Theft requires ownership in the first place and what is far more interesting to me is the fact that streaming platforms make you continuously buy things you will never own. Now, if buying is not owning... well, no wonder why people are getting back to piracy.

There is the very last problem – the profit. Streaming platforms charge a rather symbolic sum of money for monthly or yearly subscriptions. Just as the costs of a subscription are symbolic, so is the money musicians get for every streamed piece of music. Actually, calling it symbolic would be an overstatement. Streaming platforms usually do not pay artists much more than 0,01€ per stream. Most of them pay much less than a cent. Spotify, for example, goes to the extremes and does not even pay anything for tracks that have less than 1000 streams. Since I mainly write and produce music that does not have a huge audience and my fan base is a rather small gang of dedicated listeners, anyone who would hypothetically pay for a subscription in order to listen to my music would be paying money that would never reach my pocket.

There is a logical question: why should a musician have their music available on streaming platforms at all? What good does it bring?

Well, unless you are a pop icon and have millions of streams per month I do not see a single reason one should upload music there. Many musicians today present the fact of having an album on streaming platforms as some sort of professional or life achievement, which is nothing but a ridiculous sensationalism. Anybody can upload some files on Spotify. The fact is that uploading the music to the streaming platform means giving it free of charge. Something that is free of charge is always in danger of being devaluated and taken for granted. How much the music has been devaluated we can see from a simple example: my CDs usually have a price tag of 15€ and to earn 15€ from streaming platforms that averagely pay around 0,005€ per stream, one piece of music would need to be played around 3000 times, give or take.

Music has become nothing more than a tiny digital dot in the ocean of internet available to anybody. A funny fact: after my concerts, people sometimes come to the desk with the CDs and ask if they can find my music on streaming platforms. What they actually mean but do not dare to say is: can I get it online for free? Yes, streaming platforms are a concept that devaluates music and works directly against it and those that make it.

Due to all reasons I tried to explain the best I could, albums under my leadership such as In Traverse or Another World were never available on Spotify or any other similar platform and the newest album, Pilgrim’s Dream, continues that tradition. Certain older albums that used to be available on those platforms have been removed. While this decision might seem like bad news for some, I continue to encourage music lovers to buy the music they love in whichever way suits them and directly from artists whenever possible.

If you happen to like what I do and you wish to have some song or album or simply support what I do, by purchasing music here you can be sure that your money will reach me.