How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

I'm glad Spotify has opened up as a new revenue stream for musicians but it's a laughably small amount of revenue for how much work it is to compose/record hours of original music. Live music is still king for making money.

As an amateur pianist myself, $400 isn't a lot of money per month. I can pull $100/hr in an afternoon at a classy gig playing Classical/Jazz/Folk/Pop, you do that once per week and you're well over the $400 total for the month, without all the long history of recording/mixing/mastering/promoting that OP has done. This has allowed me to focus much more heavily on my musicianship and expanding my repertoire, rather than on recording tech/marketing. My ceiling for income is much lower this way-- I can't/don't want to find enough gigs to solely perform...but that's why I code to pay the bills.

Apple should have bought Spotify. They could've renamed it "Apple Music" if they wanted but they should have otherwise left it alone. They could've even gotten rid of the ad-supported stuff and made it subscription only, I personally wouldn't have cared.

But my point is that Spotify is everything Apple Music should be. I'm an avowed Apple fan owning and using many of their products and services for decades so when I say Apple Music is terrible it's not coming from a place of otherwise disdain that some have for Apple. Frankly, the whole iTunes and Apple Music teams should be embarrassed with what they continue to release. And if the Podcasts app isn't part of those teams it should be, because it is every bit as bad.

I hate to be negative but a spade needs to be called a spade in this case. Apple needs to be called out on those shoddy products.

This is interesting anecdotally but for those trying to make a living from their music, I would argue direct subscriptions seem far more stable and useful as part of your income. For example bandcamp or something like patreon, where I can subscribe to some artist I really like for $1-3/month or something and get access to everything they do. That's the closest model I've seen for non-huge-industry folks making a living from recordings -- which is of course usually supplemented by touring and a dozen other hustles. (for example mastering or teaching)

IMHO overall it doesn't feel like the situation has changed all that much in this era though. The same huge institutions remain magnets for a handful of lottery-winners (big labels, funded orchestras, etc) and everyone else is scraping by in myriad ways, though the ways are a bit different now.

I used to love the Discover Weekly, but now that I use Spotify most days when going to the gym any of my auto generated playlists like discover weekly kinda suck. I usually put on random gym playlists like the popular "Beast Mode" one. While I like this music for working out, I definitely don't normally enjoy listening to rap, hip hop, and EDM music however this is what most workout music consists of.

I wish I could have playlists that get ignored from Spotify's recommendation engine. Because I totally get it, Spotify thinks I'm into that kind of stuff so it's what I use Spotify for the majority of the time, however I have such a hard time finding new music to listen to on there :(.

In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up.

Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. It's become normal and acceptable to have a subscription to this stuff. It was hard to imagine in the early 2000s when so many pirated their music for free.