Visiting the Twitter this morning, my colleagues at Americana UK had retweeted a royalty statement published by Alec Bowman to show what he had earned from 25,000 streams of his music. I hope Alec won’t mind me re-posting it here, but it highlights the single biggest problem facing the music industry at present. Now I have talked before about the fact that music is mostly a cottage industry these days, and if you want to be able to listen to the huge amount of amazingly good music that is being quietly turned out by people all over the world then you need to put your hand in your pocket. If you’re looking at this and thinking “well Spotify are doing better than everyone else that’s OK I’ll support them,” look again. If this is 25,000 plays Spotify are paying Alec £0.000446 per stream. that is four one thousandths of a penny.
Now I wasn’t familiar with Alec Bowman’s music until todaybut it is sort of indie folk rock of the finest. Start with his song ‘Safe Mode’ and then just buy the whole album, which I shall be doing in a minute or two – from Bandcamp. Bandcamp are quite transparent about the costs and benefits of dealing with them. Effectively the artist pays 10% off the top of each sale. CD Baby were until recently an alternative but they have closed their shop and now focus on distributing to the streaming services, and internet radio. A possible alternative to CD Baby is Distrokid, suggested by Bandcamp if you really must be on the streaming services. But beware the comment of a Reddit user. Distrokid costs about $20 per release…
“Just know that getting a return from those services is HARD. Making back
the Distrokid costs in a year from Spotify streaming is pretty
difficult. I didn’t move to streaming services until my second or third
release”
Rant over – for now.
Cloudland Blue Quartet
Thoughts of Bandcamp enables me to correct an omission. I haven’t talked about Cloudland Blue Quartet here yet. I love the Soundscapes of Robert Fripp, the ambient music of Constance Demby, and much of what Brian Eno produces. David Reilly, Mr Quartet, is easily their equal. A release that I had to my shame missed until today was ‘4th May 2020’. Years ago I had thought of using found sounds from Shortwave Radio in pieces. i never did anything about it and wouldn’t have the talent to make it work anyway. On this album David makes it work and along with field recordings made around the date of the title and music that builds through the three movements producing a dense soundscape by the end of the third. Needs to be heard on headphones which I haven’t been able to do yet. My favourite albums are Aftersilence – Soundscapes and Disquietmusik II. This music will take hold of your soul.
I’ll come back to Soundscapes in general and Cloudand Blue Quartet in particular soon, but a last thought, and one I’ve made in several posts recently. “Name Your Price” on Bandcamp does not mean as little as you can get away with. It means a decent amount. I start at £5 and you should too.
