Why you decided not to share with your art via those channels?
“Data Lords” cost me 250 000 dollars to make – maybe even more. It’s a lot. The problem with YouTube or Spotify is that my music is critically acclaimed, but my audience is very small. The jazz audience for big band music is very niche market. On Spotify 10 000, 20 000 listeners even a 1 000 000 brings you almost nothing. You asked me what I’ve been doing for last 5 years. Largely I was preparing new music and not paying myself for it. So if you are factoring that time let’s raise the cost of “Data Lords” to 500 000 dollars. And that’s conservative, because doing what I do is beyond full time job. On my own site, I can estimate how many people will buy the recording, and based on that, I can decide what price I need to charge for it. That’s a very important thing for a musician to be able to price the music according to his or her investment that he or she must recover. There are a lot of people whose music is very expensive to produce. If they are like me, they are hiring all the musicians and engineers, paying for an expensive recording studio, and months of mixing and mastering, and before all of that, paying for the rehearsal studio, and paying the musicians for rehearsals. On the other hand, some musicians record everything on their computer at home; they don’t pay the costs for other musicians, as it might be all electronic. And yet, they might have much bigger audience than I do. For instance, somebody might be creating new age music that gets played in a spa many times, again and again as background music, playing hundreds of times a day. That person will make a lot of money, and additionally, the music is very inexpensive to produce. I know woman who writes that kind of music. It is played in elevators and hotel lobbies. She knows it’s not high art, but she makes a lot of money on Spotify (laugh). Someone like me couldn’t pay for a sandwich on Spotify income.
Unfortunately on Spotify - it’s all about number of listeners…
On Spotify and on Youtube we are all priced the same. They determine what one listen pays and we all are paid the same. But music isn’t always the same. It costs different amounts. But with the streaming economy, there is unfortunately no free market to set one’s own price. And the problem is, that the most expensive music like my music or classical music – we have the smallest audiences. So in the world of streaming, they’ve made things so that we can’t determine our own price. It’s an impossible situation, because at the same time, if your music isn’t on Spotify, a lot of people out there will never know you exist. It’s abuse of the market. What are new artists who create niche music supposed to do? Thankfully, I built my devoted audience many years ago through Artistshare. But now it’s getting harder and harder. Spotify is very convenient for listeners and very difficult for musicians.
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