Pre-move blues

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.


Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?


I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.


I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.


Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)


Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.


Video of the month
As part of my look at artists I haven't visited for a while, I went to see what The Blanko were up to. This is a group that formed when one of my previous likes from Finland (an artist called Flylow) split with the members heading off into two different bands, the second of which (Cobrastyle) seems to have dropped off the face of the earth some time in 2010. Enjoy Face The Fear which looks like it might be a release off a forthcoming album

Who I've been looking at

Music is being forced to take more of a back seat at the moment. As I mentioned in my previous post there's a house move on the cards which means I've been spending a lot of time recently doing all the stuff necessary to get it on the market and sold rather than looking round for music.

Priority one on the music front has therefore been to try and get an updated status on things I'm waiting for. As all of these are coming from abroad, I obviously need to be keeping a close eye on dates etc. in order to coordinate with an address change. This type of mail can't always be redirected to a new address (depending on a number of things) and could land up getting returned to sender a month or two later as a result.

Cubworld's second single release before the album was supposed to be out in June, but I landed up tweeting him late on 30th as there was no sign of anything on Sellaband.  A few days later I got a reply which said "I decided to take another 5 years to release all the tracks. Wish me luck :)". On the one hand seemingly a joke, on the other not really the kind of joke I want to see given my sense of humour circuits have been pretty much disconnected for a number of months where the last few overdue Sellaband albums are concerned - this is a subject which just isn't funny any more. A second track "Good Morning Love" has since appeared on his Bandcamp page and his website which appears to be one of the more "chilled out" tracks he mentioned, but if it is the second single release before the album, it hasn't shown up for Sellaband believers on their dashboards yet.

Elsewhere on overdue albums, Lori Greco's twitter feed contained a couple of interesting tweets over the past few weeks, suggesting in the first that the album would be finished in July ready for a digital release in August and in a more recent second one that it would be finished "next week" , which at time of discovery equated to the first week in July. Not long after this an email came through from Lori via the Sellaband system saying the album would be available for download by the end of July. Could it really be that I might actually see an album in my hands before the "4 years since funding completion" deadline hits in mid-August? And will the album actually appear on Sellaband before the end of July in the first place based on what I've been seeing with Cubworld? Watch this space.

Finally another update from Vertical Horizon on their overdue album. Apparently they are looking at releasing it in the Autumn but have no firm date set yet. It's looking more likely that this will appear after the move rather than before as a result, but is currently the item I need to keep the closest eye on based on the information I currently have.

Poets of the Fall are currently spending most time on getting together bonus material for the DVD. August release date is therefore still looking good at this point. Couldn't be happier with the way they are keeping people updated on the project either, and it's probably no surprise that they have passed the 250% funding mark and are still going as a result (albeit slowly but steadily) despite many incentives now being sold out.

The last item on my current list of outstanding items is in the more-or-less "on its way" category. This is Matthew Ebel's "Best Of" album which you can get a digital copy of completely for free just by signing up to his mailing list, as he's now sending this out instead of the 5 free songs he was sending previously. This contains tracks taken from all of the albums he has released via his website to date, but in many cases (particularly tracks from earlier albums) they have been remixed and enhanced compared to the recording you'll find on the original CD. As an Entourage membership, I'm obviously expecting something a little more physical in addition to the digital release going to his mailing list, though whether or not he's close to sending this yet or whether it will hang around until the annual goody bag (most likely due in the Autumn) to help save on postage is something I don't know. Based on how the house move is going, I may still need to get some coordination sorted here at a later date.

My most recent music purchase has been the new We Love The Underground album "Mouthful of Graffiti" which I've been a little hesitant about as the preview tracks Brad posted didn't exactly grab me in the same way as those from the first album and I was left wondering whether it would find itself in the traditional "difficult second album" category as a result. The biggest surprise when the album arrived was probably the fact that it included a couple of tracks he had originally released under the Niki Thunders name. Overall, after listening some more, I don't think it's as good an album as the first, mostly because there's nothing that immediately grabs your attention, but I am finding a few of the tracks are starting to grow on me more than I originally thought they would. I've actually cooled slightly from the 4 star rating I felt the project warranted after the first album to more like 3 to 3 and a half as a result.

And I've already got my next album purchase planned. Even if anything comes out beforehand that I'm interested in, it's likely it will get left until after the move and most likely behind this one in the queue if I'm short of cash, given how much I like this particular artist. Elton John's new album "The Diving Board" is the album in question, due for release in September and you can already view a lyric video of one of the tracks from this album on his official website.

Keeping watch on some of the crowdfunding projects I mentioned in the last post has also been interesting. Initially I was rather worried about Gayle Skidmore's effort to raise $8000 given it didn't seem to be moving much despite what I thought were some pretty tempting incentives on offer (e.g. digital download of the new album along with a PDF of the colouring book for just $1, or digital download of her entire back catalog of albums on bandcamp for just $10) , but after she started going overboard with the tweets and retweets it accelerated into a last minute frenzy I haven't seen since the early days on Sellaband with over half of the money raised arriving in the last couple of days of the project. In the end she actually finished with over $10,000 and 460 people on board.

The Civilized Tears video funding by contrast seems to have been a much more painful affair given they have only been looking for 1000 euros and trying to get this for longer than Gayle's project was up. (and in fact are still only around the halfway mark at time of writing) Whilst it's obvious from some of the comments going around that some people are being put off by the fact the funding is in euros and not dollars, I'm still left wondering how much of a problem the "Sellaband Effect" is having. I've stated many times before that I won't even contemplate going near any project being funded on Sellaband while I'm still waiting for albums from the "old era" (which were due years ago), irrespective of who asks so it seems hard to say how many others are being put off by the mere fact Sellaband is involved and how many just aren't that interested in the range of incentives on offer (something I consider quite a poor selection in the first place).

Fox Amoore's project isn't currently up, but he does have the funding video recorded now and the title of the project appears to be "Come Find Me", so I'm expecting to see this appear soon - probably after he gets back from the mini tour of the USA he's currently on.

It will be interesting to see what Aly Cook does. She already dropped her budget from 40,000 to 25,000 euros a while back but there is less than a month to go before this project will fail for the second time to raise its budget in a year, and she still has over a third of the way to go. A change to somewhere around the 18K mark might see her through, but I'm not yet convinced anything higher will unless there really is a last minute rush.

On the discoveries side, Galia Arad is the main artist to grab my attention recently, though she could really do with a proper website than her current blog-style affair which attempts to cram the entire site on one page and hence takes a while to load as well as being a bit of an information overload (whilst in many cases explaining nothing e.g. what the heck is the "how to exploit your grandfather" set of links even about in the first place??).

As you can probably guess, I haven't really been looking for new artists in general this month but instead spent my limited time in a bit of a "Whatever Happened To...?" mode by checking up on some old familiar names. Bulletproof Messenger still seem to be procrastinating on their next album, and in fact seem to have pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth given the fact their website hasn't been updated in ages and there have been very few social media postings since their April Fool's joke that a new album was about to be released. Trail have also been very quiet this year since their post in January that they were listening to the final mix for the first track off their new album - I had been expecting to see some more information about this before. Radius are another one who seem to have done a disappearing act with the last information on their website (from months ago) seeming to suggest a search for a new bass player was underway. I'm particularly struck by the irony of their most recent tweet (which was posted on New Year's Day) "Happy New Year!!!! We'll be back on track in 2013!!!!"

The sites I've been looking at

Sellaband
It's been a while since I took an overall picture on how things are changing at Sellaband. The number of artists on the site appears to still be on a general downward trend, despite there still being at least two where both the "Active since" and "Last seen" dates are over a year old, one of which where both these dates are even both over 2 years old. Suffice it to say, Sellaband obviously still haven't fixed the problem which has been round for over a year now with some projects not being deleted even after they exceed their supposed 1 year of active life mentioned in the T&C.

Maybe that's about to change though? Sellaband have announced some forthcoming changes to their terms and conditions which could well result in artist profiles being deleted if the artist hasn't visited them in the past month. At the same time, it appears that a change on the believer side with believers needing to be active every 2 months or their profile will be deleted is also coming into effect at the same time. Which gets me to thinking... just how many believer profiles are there out there with just a few eurocents in them (basically hardly worth a withdrawal) and how much money would Sellaband therefore stand to gain by claiming all these unused funds? Enough to keep the site limping along for a few more months perhaps?

The number of artists on the site at time of writing has been dropping for a while now on its own. Whilst the current number of these is below 500 at time of writing, both the percentage and number of artists with at least 1% of their budget raised does appear to be increasing (having finally passed the 60 mark for the first time since I started checking), though the number on a "significant" percentage of budget raised does appear to be remaining fairly static - only a handful are over halfway to target and indeed only around 10 artists are currently over 25% of budget raised. The increase in 1% raised is at least partly due to most artists now signing up with much lower budgets than previously - the larger number of artists with 5000 euro or less budgets obviously makes it much easier to get 1% raised compared to the 50K budget of the original site concept. How much longer is the site going to limp along at this rate? Many would say it's already way past the date they were expecting it to fold for the second time.

But one interesting thing I recently discovered on the site is the "Artist Academy" pages obviously designed to help artists set up their Sellaband project, but I can't help but wonder how many artists actually even read them as you don't see any mention of them on the site until you actually hit the artist signup page. At which point it's probably too late as I can see way more people just filling in the signup boxes rather than clicking a link that goes away from the page to another site area entirely. Amongst the more interesting information on these pages is the statement that Sellaband sees the average believer donation as being around 20 euros, a project page needs to be viewed on average 208 times for every believer you get and that 42 is not only the answer to life, the universe and everything, but also the key to how many believers you need to succeed on Sellaband once you know your budget. Well worth a read but way more information is presented in this guide than the majority are going to bother with once they got as far as the signup form - it's pretty much the equivalent of people reading the instruction manual for their new appliance when they've already opened the box and got the appliance out. If Sellaband really want people to be reading these, they ought to make them do so before presenting them with a page of boxes about their project to fill in.

Patreon
The basic idea behind this website is that you agree to give an artist a tip every time they come up with a new piece of content. The minimum amount is $1 which gives you the ability to post on their wall and follow their updates, however if you decide you want to give a higher amount every time the artist produces a new piece of content, you'll get whatever extras that artist provides for each tier that the artist sets. For instance, one artist I looked at had a $3 and a $10 a tier where the $3 got you a download of the song as well and for the $10 you got the song download and a customised thankyou drawing.

In terms of how the payments work, it seems they currently only take payments using a system called Stipe, which appears to be a Paypal-a-like but something which I'd never heard of before, and hence it feels a bit restrictive if you were thinking of becoming a patron compared to other sites which take much more common options for payment. You don't get charged immediately that the artist creates the content, but instead get charged once a month based on all the content that all of the artists you support on the site have released that month. Patreon takes 5% of that to cover their own costs and the Stipe system eats up about another 3% in transaction charges. As a patron, if you're worried about getting a huge bill one month if artists go nuts producing content, you can apparently set a maximum amount that you'll pay out, however it's unclear from the T&C if you can then go back and buy the content you missed out on in a quieter month or whether you're forced to miss out on that entirely.

The site doesn't just support musicians, but also video producers, short film makers, bloggers and indeed anything along these lines that you can think of. But it's unclear just how many content creators are using the site at present as it's really only possible to see the list of featured artists on the home page before you're forced to resort to using the search function. Not great as a potential patron browsing to see who you might be interested in, but once again only really a site for those with people already interested in them rather than something you could use as a discovery tool. And for me that limits its potential and brings us back to the point that as an artist you could get a similar system set up on your own website for your existing fans and hence save yourself the 5% middleman. If this were more of a discovery tool that allowed you to more easily find and connect with new potential fans it would look much more attractive  - as you can't even use the site to talk to an artist until you've already agreed to tip them, I'm left failing to see how useful this could actually be.

And finally...
That's all for this post. Once again there's likely to be a longer than normal gap to the next post due to the house move taking up a lot of time over the next few months.

The crowdfunding update

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.


Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?


I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.


I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.


Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)


Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Video of the month

As a music lover, one of my biggest sources of music outside of internet sites themselves is actually other (usually indie) musicians. And whilst I often find myself wading through a whole heap of stuff I just don't get on with, occasionally I run across an artist where most of what they point out turns out to fit extremely well with my music tastes. This month's video therefore comes as a result of one such recommendation. Enjoy "Hot Damn" by Ivy Levan whose debut EP has recently been released.

Who I've been looking at

In my travels this month looking for artists, the vast majority seem to have come with attached crowdfunding stories.

First on the list has got to be updates on the items I'm currently waiting on. The biggest update seems to be from Cubworld who made the first track from his album available for download - Sellaband believers in his second project should check their dashboards for the free download (if they didn't get the email) as the track is already released. Much like "Rocked Out" from his first album, "Life is Music" has turned out to be pretty much a grower on me and with what I've previously heard of  "Shaka Laka" on his website,  I'm now interested to see whether the rest of the album can manage to grab me where the first pretty much failed. The second single from the album is supposed to be released this month with the full album release due in July. Fingers crossed this is one overdue project I can finally cross off the list soon.

Elsewhere on the overdue list, there's been no update from Vertical Horizon for nearly 3 months now. Whilst I know there is no such thing as a fixed length of time for mastering an album, this still seems rather a long time for this stage of the process - I was expecting to hear it was back by now and that maybe physical production and/or artwork was basically all that was left holding things up. Meanwhile, whilst the dates on the articles on Lori Greco's website homepage have changed, the articles themselves are still the same ones I read back in March. So no new news on this seemingly non-existent album which has been "coming soon" for nearly 4 years now. But news on her Twitter page about how excited she is to have submitted 6 new songs to a songwriting competition. Go figure what's going on here, because I obviously got lost a while back.

In better news the Poets of the Fall DVD is looking on target for its projected August release (though it's still too early to tell whether it will make it on time or not) and is slowly creeping towards 250% funded on Pledge Music even though somewhat more than half of the incentive levels have sold out completely and at least one more is getting low on numbers.

In terms of other projects which I'm not funding (yet) but am keeping an eye on the following interesting list of things has popped up.

The fund for Daniel Ward Murphy's second album on Fundrazr hasn't moved in months but I recently spotted something on his Facebook page which says he is considering private funding and asking if anyone knows anyone out there who might be interested. So much for his open letter claiming crowdfunding as the last roll of the dice but rather chalk another one up for what I see as the "artist's soul" and its inability to let go of music. I'll be keeping a watch out to see if this story has any more twists and turns and he does manage to get another album out or not.

Civilized Tears finally set up their video funding project on Sellaband, although you won't find this under the main listings but rather it is one of the new style pledge-a-like pages. But in typical Sellaband facepalm-inducing fashion the project page itself is open to being misinterpreted as it initially states the project is to fund a video for their song "Stars", when in actual fact (as you'll find further through the description) a poll is running on their Facebook page to decide whether the video should be for "Stars" or "Antidote". And despite pointing this howler out to Tim on Twitter, (yes I bet you've guessed what I'm about to say) the project page still has this conflicting information on it. Add to that the fact the links on the project page lead to a Facebook login prompt rather than allowing you to see the Facebook content (even though this is visible if you navigate to it on Facebook itself irrespective of whether you have an account or not) and it's not the kind of page to fill you with confidence if you were looking at it wondering whether or not to fund an artist.

One to watch for some time in July is going to be Fox Amoore attempting to take his first foray into crowdfunding in order to try and raise enough money to record an album at Abbey Road studios. Given the already good quality of his home releases, I'll be interested to see just how much this can add to his cinematic style if he can make it work - the result ought to be an amazing sounding release. I've been watching him get to grips with the preparations for this by asking his fans what they'd like to see as incentive levels and for general feedback on the project and the last I saw he was making preparations to film the funding video. I've seen a couple of different funding platforms mentioned but I'm not yet sure which one he's settled on. Watch this space to see where it actually appears.

Gayle Skidmore is on Kickstarter with a very short funding project for marketing a new album. As with her Sellaband one, this once again comes with a colouring book for some of the incentive levels. But you'll have to be fast as there's only a couple of weeks to fund it.

Moving away from the crowdfunding side of things, I seem to be undergoing a bit of a music explosion at the moment based on the absolute flood of artists that have caught my attention for the first time in the past few weeks. Most notable of these seems to be Fiction 20 Down (also known as f20d) who should really be something I run away screaming from given (as I've stated many times before) I don't like rap. But whether it's their more melodic style fused with reggae and rock or whether it's something else entirely, somehow they not only manage to get away with it, but in actual fact have a couple of songs I actually quite like. Whilst there are others which do fit the expected "can't stand", I expect I might find the further odd track I like popping up from time to time so will probably keep an occasional eye on them. You can currently download their latest EP for free in exchange for an email address via their website.

If you like drinking as well as music then Ali Spagnola could be well up your street. She is currently touring  her 2012 album which is based on a drinking game. The "Power Hour" experience basically consists of 60 one minute songs with the idea that you take a shot of beer every time the song changes. Obviously it depends on the size of your shot glass, but if you were in the UK that's roughly 3 pints of beer in an hour. As well as being able to experience this as a live concert, she also sells her album on a USB stick built into a shot glass for those who prefer to get drunk with their mates at home. There's also quite a story involving the 3 year legal battle over this album and concert which you can read on her own website. If you like art as well as music, then she's also making and sending paintings all over the world for free (though with a current backlog she encourages you to donate to move further up the queue given she's made over 1900 already) so there's plenty of things of (unusual) interest to find on her website.

Reverbnation provided a find in the form of Stirling from Australia. This seems to be (mostly) a family affair given the surname of most of the band members. The rather haunting track "Mind Control" is the one that initially got my attention, although there's something about the piano in "Writing's on the Wall" which has a definite ability to get stuck in your head.

Alexandria Maillot is another artist that I got pointed towards as a result of following another artist on Twitter. You can download her EP from Bandcamp on a "pay what you want" basis. For me the stand out track is "Just Another Girl" but the whole of the 7 track EP is well worth a listen.

Most interesting of artists that followed me on Twitter recently has got to be Space March whose retro electronic sound should definitely be up your street if you were fans of 80s acts such as Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys or Erasure etc. One of the more unusual tracks is a version of the classical music track by Grieg "In the Hall of the Mountain King" with added lyrics. But it must be said that whilst I like the music, this is another artist where the videos are making me cringe. If you were thinking of heading off to check them out, don't say I didn't warn you.

Somehow between all the crowdfunding artists and new artists, I did manage to fall over a couple of old faces that didn't fit into either of these categories. Firstly Cavali Jay is moving to Dubai with the aim of trying to get his music to take off in the Middle East and use that region as a launch pad for getting heard in the rest of the world. If it succeeds this will be a rather unusual direction for music to come from seeing as the vast majority still seems to come via the UK, USA, Germany, Australia or Japan and he's actually moving from the UK.

GD Allan looks like he's putting together a new CD which appears to be called "Beats and Pieces" if I've been following the breadcrumb trail round the internet correctly. It seems he is remixing some of the tracks he posted while he was on Sellaband as part of this as well as including some music from more recent times. He seems to be mostly using Soundcloud for posting tracks at the moment and recently managed to grab me with a song called "River Runs Dry" which is the first song of his in ages to properly do so - in fact since "Bitter Pill".

The sites I've been looking at

Soundcloud
If you hadn't noticed it yet, you should have seen I've now got a soundcloud playlist over on the right of this blog which contains music I've recently discovered (irrespective of whether it's recently released or something I only just picked up on) and am enjoying a lot. I'm aiming to keep the playtime around a half hour in length, so expect the featured songs on here to start changing as I find more music that catches my interest.

Underground Music FM
If you liked thesixtyone before their redesign of a number of years ago, I'd describe this site as the best replacement I've seen so far. Whilst it lacks community features for listeners, it follows a similar principle of artists being able to upload as little or as much of their music at once in the hopes of getting it trending on the site. This is the site I originally found Fiction 20 Down on, but like thesixtyone it can require a lot of work to find the diamonds you like in amongst the rough that you don't. Particularly due to the lack of real community features. And whilst there is a blog featuring artists on the site it is set up in such a way that it feels like a whole separate site rather than part of the site you're listening to music on. I'm not sure how much I'll land up using it to find music as a result because it seems to eat up too much time just to find even one artist you like.

Adsy.me
Remember the site called Slowbizz which was aimed at getting a network of music lovers to set up house concerts? Well I went to have a look and see how things were going there as there hadn't been any updates in ages, only to find the site redirected to something called adsy.me. After a bit of research I discovered that the Slowbizz site owner had undergone a "pivot". Or to put it in English, it looks like he has completely ditched the Slowbizz idea because it wasn't working and come up with a completely unrelated idea instead. But because he doesn't want to lose web traffic, he's redirected all the Slowbizz links to his new site, despite the fact the new project has nothing to do with the old.

In actual fact the new project appears to be a way of letting people create simple mobile applications without needing to know any of the code that a programmer would normally need. Not something I'd normally cover in a music blog, but in this particular case it could turn out to be something of use for musicians to create their own apps for fans without needing a deep understanding of technology. It's worthwhile checking out the video in which he creates an app for The Boxer Rebellion to get an idea of just how easy this is. On the downside the system is currently only available to those.users with Apple products (e.g. an iPhone), although an Android version is in development which should give it a much wider mobile phone userbase. The other interesting point is that it seems the apps apparently are stored on the adsy.me site rather than being something made available in the app store your phone would normally link to. As a result it might be worth considering the site terms and conditions a lot more seriously than the humorous way they are presented before deciding whether this is something that would really be of interest. Personally I'm going to wait until the Android version comes out before taking a better look at how the whole thing works in practice.

And finally...
I'm hoping things are going to quieten down on the music front over the next couple of months as it looks like we'll be moving house at some point soon. There's no firm date set yet though, so hopefully I'll get at least one more post out before I need to worry about taking a break from this blog.

How much streaming revenue you should really be making

Unless you've been living in a cave recently, you should be aware that a large debate has been raging about streaming revenues on the Internet and how much artists should actually be making from streaming. I've been busy looking at numbers available from various places on the internet in order to try and calculate an answer to that question for you.

The revenue calculations

There are two possible ways we can come up with an average. One is to look on a per artist basis, the other to look on a per stream basis. Either way, there are a number of figures we need to try and get hold of, which leads to the following questions.

1. How many internet users are there?
According to Internetworldstats, there were just under 2.5 billion internet users in June 2012. Obviously not all of them will listen to music via the internet, but as a starting point for calculations, let's assume they do.

2. How much music does the average person listen to in a day?
Not a particularly clear answer on this one as it depends on many factors such as where you live and whether you work. I've seen figures between 1 and 13hrs a day quoted. For the purposes of this experiment, I'm going to go towards the generous end of the spectrum and use a figure of 10 hrs a day as a starting point.

3. So how many tracks is that in a year?
If we assume a track is 5 minutes in length, in theory you'd be able to listen to 12 tracks an hour. In practice, thanks to things like news bulletins and advertising it probably makes more sense to drop this to 10 tracks in an hour. Using our figures from above this means a person can listen to 100 tracks in a day or around 36500 in a year.

4. How many artists are there?
Hard to say. The best figure I have comes from the current front page of last.fm which mentions tracks from 54 million artists. It would be pretty safe to say there are probably a lot more who aren't currently on the service.

5. How many available tracks are there?
Again, hard to say for the same kind of reasons as number of artists. Once again, I'm using the figure from last fm which states 640 million

6. How many listeners to an artist?
2.5 billion = 2500 million, so we can say that each of our 54 million artists should have around 46 listeners in an ideal world where every artist is created equal. The true figure is almost certainly less for the majority. "But people listen to more than one artist" you might say. Correct, but each of those artists would then only get a percentage of the revenue i.e. if one listener listens to 10 different artists equally, each artist effectively gets 1/10 of the listening hours and revenue that listener can provide.  We're just making the calculations simpler here.

7. So on an artist basis, how much revenue?
I'm going to use UK pounds here, but as UK streaming services are looking at charging around £10 a month, EU ones 10 euros a month and US ones $10 a month, you could probably just ignore the currency sign wherever I use it and consider the numbers in terms of whichever of the 3 currencies makes most sense to you.

46 listeners paying £10 a month = £460 a month in revenue. However this assumes that all of your 46 listeners can both afford to pay and are prepared to pay £10 a month, which is unlikely given they need to come from the total world population. Even if all 46 can afford it, you're still not going to see all of that £460 as some of it is going to get eaten up by sales taxes and the cut that the streaming service itself takes. Plus, if you have a label then they may well take a cut before you see any of that money. Assuming that about 25% of the money actually makes its way to you, this means the average artist would get a mere £115 a month

8. So on a track basis, how much revenue?
Just like the lottery, not all artists are created equal in terms of the number of tracks they have available, so in many ways this figure may make more sense than going from the number of artists themselves i.e. having more tracks gives you more chance at getting revenue.

We already know that our 2.5 billion people are going to listen to 36500 x 2.5 billion tracks in a year. That's a total of  91250000000000 plays. If each of our 2.5 billion people is paying £120 a year (£10 a month), that means those plays are generating £300000000000 which is roughly equivalent to £0.003 a play.

And if there are 460 million tracks, this means that on average each one will be played around 198,000 times a year or 16,500 a month. At £0.003 a play this means a track would generate less than £50 of revenue a month.

However, once again if we assume that only 25% of the revenue generated by plays actually reaches you the artist, that means each track is capable of generating you around £12 a month

What does this really mean?

On the one hand it's hardly great money, but on the other it doesn't sound like the streaming situation is quite as bad as many artists are making out.

But on the other, if you consider the questions again carefully, you should see that I have generally erred towards the generous side as far as you, the artist is concerned. If there were more artists or more tracks out there, you'd have more competition and hence less revenue. If people are actually listening to less hours of music than I've suggested, once again you'll have less revenue. If (as is likely) not all internet users listen to music on the internet in the first place, you'll have less revenue. In other words the figures of £115 (artist) and £12 (track) for an average artist are likely to be close to absolute best figures that streaming could provide.

But wait... it gets WORSE.

The most obvious point here is that the music industry as a whole is currently not worth anything like £300 billion a year (2.5 billion people paying £120 a year). Even if we consider all sources of revenue such as concerts, merchandising, advertising and sales of things like CDs and players, the best estimate I've seen is $168 billion. And currently streaming is only a small fraction of that - something like 10%. So if we base on 16.8 billion instead of 300 billion (and assume £=$ as per question 6 above), the average artist should currently be earning less than £6.50 a month (artist) or £0.70 a month (track) from streaming. Is it really any wonder that artists are worried about streaming revenues and the income they might receive if CD sales disappear?

Even if the whole of the $168 billion was to come from streaming in the future we've still got to more or less halve the absolute best figures I came up with earlier. Or to put it another way, current spending on all areas of music needs to both double and come from streaming alone if an artist is to see anything close to the absolute best figures I've quoted.

Also the internet is still fairly new in terms of the average age a human lives to. That means there are independent artists who died before the internet was around and it's likely their music isn't anywhere to be found on it as a result. In a world where every artist is created equal, that means you're up against not just your current peers but also every other artist whose music has either hit the internet in the past or will do so in the future. In other words we can expect the number of artists on the internet to go up. So thinking 5, 10 or more years down the line, your music will likely be up against the music from all the new artists that appeared in that time as well as new music from artists currently on there and most of/all the music currently on there.from artists who are already dead or who died in that time. If the competition goes up, your share of the music revenues goes down.

Of course this in turn raises some interesting questions with regard to both the present and the future of music licensing. We can already say with certainty that the 54 million artists contains artists from tens or even hundreds of years ago (think Bach, Mozart etc. for starters) so not all of the tracks out there are likely to be due revenue under current conditions. If independent artists say things should be on an equal footing, what should this really mean for the future in terms of how and when revenues should be paid to artists? Should revenues only be paid while an artist is alive? And what happens to the revenues generated by someone listening to a track by an artist who has died if so? Should there be a "lifetime" for a track in terms of revenues being paid for it or should it still count towards revenue calculations whether played now, or in 10/20/50/more years time? What would happen to revenues after a track's "lifetime" was up? i.e. if a listener was paying £10 a month but only ever listened to tracks whose "lifetime" was up, where would the money they paid go?  Just a few of the questions to be considered.

Some other statistics you might find interesting.
1. With 54 million artists available and the ability to listen to 36500 tracks a year  (based on the information above), it would take me nearly 1480 YEARS to listen to just one track (and then only once)  from each of the artists currently available. That's more than 15 lifetimes to listen to every artist currently out there if I listen for 10 hours a day every day of the year. If you wanted the ultimate proof of why finding your music is like looking for a needle in a haystack and why so few people are listening to you, then this is surely it.

2. It might be hard to fathom where the RIAA is coming from when it is deciding that streaming 100 tracks = 1 sale. As sales are generally £0.99, this would make one play equal to £0.0099 rather than the "best possible" of £0.003 I quoted earlier, particularly when you remember that this figure is derived from streaming revenues of 300 billion a year rather than the industry current of more like 17 billion of streaming revenues. Even with some income from advertising on top, if there are indeed at least 640 million tracks out there, then one sale should currently be worth more like 2% of the "best possible" figure if all artists are to be treated equally. (i.e. more like 5000 plays = 1 sale = £0.99).

3. The figure of 100 streams = 1 sale is also interesting based on our previous calculations. You should remember from earlier that I stated a figure of 10 hours listening a day or 100 tracks being played in a day as the basis for calculations. This would mean the average user was effectively buying a track a day or more like 3 albums in a month if they streamed music for 10 hours a day. It also means that to buy the equivalent of one album a month, you'd actually need to be streaming music for only something like 3 hours a day,  if 100 streams = 1 sale. Interestingly if 5000 streams were equal to one sale, then our 10 hour a day listener would be buying the equivalent of just over 3 tracks a month with a 3 hour a day listener purchasing just the one.

This is really getting to the root of the problem the industry faces. When presented with "all available music" even hardcore music lovers tend to become casual purchasers, yet to accurately filter out something like 90% of this before it ever gets played to make it seem worthwhile to buy leads us back to a situation where we have a "music elite". When you can buy only the tracks you like (compared to a single or CD where you may land up with "padding tracks" that you wouldn't normally buy but which just happened to come free with it), even without piracy it leads to the general behaviour of people buying a lower number of tracks at once.

In summary
After running the numbers, I was actually quite shocked at how bad some of them turned out compared to what I'd thought they might be. It seems clear to me that the miniscule figures per play that streaming services quote are actually quite realistic in a world where artists want equal treatment (if a figure of at least 54 million of them is to be believed). It's also clear that something is going to have to give somewhere for artists to be able to make the same living from music streaming that was possible from CD sales because of the increased competition - instead of a case where only a CD could be sold before (and not every artist would get to make one) now anyone has the potential to make money just by uploading a track.  But clearly, if you're currently receiving at least £7 / $7 /7 euros a month from all streaming services combined I'd say congratulations - you're already a successful artist.

Although independent artists say they want equal treatment, there are clearly way too many artists and tracks out there for the streaming income available. Unless music revenues as a whole make a significant leap in a very short period of time, the future could be a case of the "money pie" being split far too many ways to give anyone enough of an income to live on if the figures I've found and calculated are any indication. The top end artists don't make enough of a difference to everyone else when their money is shared out and would merely increase the number of artists receiving a fraction not much above nothing in an equal streaming world. (compared to a world where the vast majority of artists used to receive nothing at all and a few could break even or maybe turn a profit). We're already seeing the start of this shift with so few long term "superstars of music" being created these days as the money is already being spread more widely than it was before the internet.

Clearly something is needed to lessen the impact of the move towards streaming as there is way too much supply compared to demand. Whether that means the number of artists making music just needs to drop dramatically or whether the reality is such that the "music elite" that so many independents complain about needs to remain in some form (e.g. where only the top 2% of played songs would actually receive revenues) to enable at least some artists to make a proper living from music is unclear. If music sales get completely replaced by streaming at some point in the future it looks to me like artists will still lose out unless consumers are prepared to spend a lot more (basically to take over covering the loss makers the labels have traditionally had) The myth that you can make money as an artist by using the increased audience on the internet will remain just that - with luck a few may, but the vast majority still won't.

Now that you've seen the numbers, how much do you agree or disagree with my analysis, and what do you think needs to change to enable artists to make a living?

Visiting the familiar and new

If you already know about my rating system then skip on down to the next header, otherwise here's the lowdown.

The rating system
The rating system I use for this blog is somewhat unique. It's not a reflection of how much I like the music itself as much as it is of how far I am along the process of conversion from consumer to fan. So, over time you may well see some of these ratings go up if I mention an artist again. And indeed go down, as musical changes of direction or failure to keep my interest are just some of the reasons that may affect a rating.


Congratulations, you've made a temporary blip of interest on my radar. Now how are you going to keep it?


I've seen enough of you to recognise and remember you, but I'm undecided so I'm not really following you (yet). I may make a spur of the moment decision to check in on what you're up to once in a while, but even that's no guarantee. May also apply to artists I am aware of, but whose music I've decided I don't have enough interest in to want to pursue further based on what I've heard.


I'm liking what I hear in general, but I still wouldn't describe myself as a fan. I will be wandering past your site occasionally, and there is something like a 50% chance I'll be buying your next offering once I find out about it, providing I have the money available.


Now I am a fan, so the chances are I'll be past your site once every month or two at least. There's a 90%+ chance your next offering is already sold, and occasionally I might even be going for something more than the basic package (if you have one)


Reserved for very few, this is about as close to internet stalker as you can get. I am actively watching because I do not want to miss your next release date, tour in my area etc. etc. You may not always be aware of the fact I'm looking over your shoulder to see what you're up to, but trust me, I'm there on a weekly if not more like a daily basis. Depending on how you tend to release your information, I may well be signed to your mailing list as well.

Video of the month

In one of those "Whatever happened to...?" moments, I found myself wandering past Dommin's website for the first time in a while. The first album had been publicised on TV over here and I'd liked what I'd heard, but that was a number of years ago and I'd never seen or heard about a followup. From what I read on this visit, it looks like this is yet another case of an artist being bitten by the traditional music industry. Read for yourself as the story goes with the video ("Not Afraid") I've chosen for this month. One thing is for sure, I expect I'll be dropping in from time to time in the near future to see if anything does get released once the label hassles have been sorted. Whilst Kickstarter has been mentioned, I can't help but get the gut feeling that this is something that might do much better with the involvement of Pledgemusic instead, despite the fact I'm not sure if Kristofer has even heard of the site.

Who I've been looking at

It's not often I win something, so it was quite a nice surprise to get an Amazon gift voucher from the music discovery panel I was invited to a couple of months back as a thankyou for responding to their artist surveys. While I was trying to decide what to spend it on, I landed up looking through the latest recommendations the site had for me and ran across a rather interesting artist as a result of my interest in Nemesea. Issa is from Norway and the samples I listened to immediately caught my interest, as they seemed to fall in a range of music I quite like with some tracks reminding me more of  Roxette and others stretching closer to a lot of the Scandinavian rock and metal I listen to. It's therefore something of a shame that her website is a) an extremely poor one page item and b) was so extremely difficult to track down in the first place. There's potential here, but her online presence is pretty much non-existent which is the worst possible thing to be in this day and age, and the videos also seem to be pretty cringeworthy affairs more suited to the 1980s, particularly on the choreography front. In other words, nice music, shame about the rest if you're a potential fan.

For other new discoveries this month, Soundcloud provided one in the form of the electronic act Future User. The track posted caught my interest, however everything I've seen so far looks like a failed attempt to go viral with it, given their site has no information on the artist and no clues are given in their social profiles (which mostly look to have been started just this year) either. The inference is that "future user" may be more well known under another name and the idea was to get people trying to guess who it is/was, but despite the rather spammy Twitter account attempting to direct people to listen to the track it seems this idea has fallen pretty flat (if indeed that was its original intention).

I also picked up on a 15 year old artist on Reverbnation called Brandon Vitale who has some pretty catchy tracks and writes his own music. His biography on there states he is looking for major label and publishing support. The biggest problem for me is that there appears to be no website or plan of attack here. There's no doubting potential but with no visible track record and just a series of recordings it seems rather hard to understand why any label would take a chance on a youngster who seemingly has no performance experience behind them and who is obviously struggling to get people to listen to the music in the first place as he hasn't really formed any connections with people either.

Brad Cox has announced that the new We Love the Underground album is going to be titled "Mouthful of Graffiti", and whilst there's still no firm release date announced it is supposed to be released this Summer. I can't help but feel the irony here - at the rate things are going, this is looking like I'll have seen one album and one EP from Skitzo Calypso and two We Love the Underground albums all from an artist who failed to raise funding on Sellaband before I even see one album from the successfully funded project of Lori Greco who I bought parts in on Sellaband over a year before I'd even heard of Brad and his band projects.

The Pledgemusic project of Poets of the Fall passed the 200% funded mark this month and many of the items available are once again running low on numbers left. It will be interesting to see if the DVD (due August) does arrive before the album from Vertical Horizon, as things are still quieter on their side than I'd like despite the fact the Vertical Horizon album is supposed to have gone off for mixing and mastering already.

Poets of the Fall also directed me to a new artist in the form of Ima, as they had produced her new song. For non-Finnish speakers, whilst you can click on the play icon on the main page of the site, I'd actually recommend clicking on the "Nyt" link at the top of the page instead as this "latest (news)" page currently gives you the soundcloud player, and if you like what you hear, you can download the track in question. Once again, I find myself somewhat underwhelmed by the artist's own site though, as there's actually very little useful information on there once you get past the language barrier.

Things are undergoing a bit of an upheaval in the Matthew Ebel camp at the moment. For starters he's attempting to finish the book portion of the "Lives of Dexter Peterson" project, seeing as the album was out a year ago, meaning it will be something like 3 years from his original announcement of trying to get a 3 part project done in a year that we'll be seeing the end of what has turned into a 2 part project along the way. With only the first couple of chapters illustrated, the graphic novel portion got cancelled a few months ago due to personal problems for the illustrator making it unclear when, if ever, it would get finished. In addition he's behind on writing the custom songs that are due to those who have paid Entourage subscriptions and has stated he's actually thinking about removing the Entourage level as a result because he doesn't want to keep falling behind on the custom song commitment (and I know he has no real idea of what else he could offer in its place and doesn't like accepting money for nothing either). It may therefore be that I won't even be needing to consider whether to stay at Entourage level when my renewal comes due, but rather the question may be what subscription I take instead if this change goes ahead.

Personally, I'm not convinced the removal of this subscription level would be a good idea if there are people willing to pay that amount of money - there's a big difference between 5 people paying $500 a year and those 5 people most likely dropping back to $149 a year when it comes to income - it essentially means you need more than 10 extra fans to appear from nowhere to make up the difference which is not the easiest of things to achieve in a still faltering economy when it's already hard enough for existing fans to keep on supporting you in the first place.

And if that little lot wasn't enough to be working on, he's decided he needs to get more of an "angle" to his shows to try and convince people to book him rather than being just another guy playing a piano. This means he isn't running his weekly show streams at the moment, but instead has been building a set for his basement studio and is working on costumes and storylines as well with the idea of relaunching as a sci-fi themed weekly show similar to the High Orbit podcasts he used to do. However this change is also going to have an impact on his subscription model as he wants to put the resulting videos up on Youtube so potential bookers for live shows can see what they would be getting, which means they are then publicly available rather than exclusive subscriber content. In other words the question then becomes what subscribers will get for their monthly subscription money instead (particularly at the entry level). At the rate things are going, I'm therefore left wondering whether or not his entire subscription model is going to need a reworking as a result of all the changes in progress which seem to impact on it.

I find myself rather in two minds about Aly Cook's latest endeavour. She's still attempting to raise funds on Sellaband for her second album and still has over halfway to go for her current target, yet at the same time has started up an IndieGoGo project for her band the Sou'Westers to raise funds for a video for their first single. On the plus side, an IndieGoGo campaign does at least ensure she will get whatever money it manages to raise and I can see the idea was to treat it as an album presale campaign, but on the minus side there's the thought that having this second project running at the same time as the first isn't really such a good idea as people have limited money and can't put it in two places at once.

The sites I've been looking at
 Interestingly I haven't been looking at any sites in particular recently as it seems more like I've been on a random wander between a lot of my usual haunts to see if any new artists pop up during my listening time on them.

The only thing I did pay some attention to was the finish of the "Bandcontest" on Sellaband. Interestingly not only did one artist actually meet the target (despite this looking very unlikely to happen for most of the month the contest was running), it seems they exceeded it by a rather round looking 20%. With three hours to go, this same artist was on 80% of funds raised and as little as 24 hours before the end of the contest they had still been stuck on somewhat less than 20% of funds raised. Interestingly, the second artist in the competition also made a rather round looking 80% of their total budget by the end of the contest, despite having been in single digits of funds raised with 24hrs to go. The third of the 3 artists barely moved in the last 24hrs, finishing the contest on 5% of budget. I'll leave it to the conspiracy theorists (and you) to decide whether we actually saw an old style last minute rush to buy as with the Sellaband of times past or whether some convenient number fixing took place to avoid the embarrassment the contest was looking likely to turn into if you'd been following its progress from the start.

And finally...
I've been crunching some numbers recently from data freely available on the internet as a result of the debate on whether artists are actually being paid enough for streaming music and the RIAA's recent announcement that 100 streams should count as one sale. I'm in the process of writing up the rather interesting looking results of that into what should form my next blog post (hopefully within the next week). Suffice it to say that at best the results should give you something to think about and at worst may actually scare you. Irrespective of whether you're a listener or a musician, this is one post I think you definitely won't want to miss.