My Life as an Album Listener
An exploration of streaming vs buying
I’m curious as to how many people can relate to this:
I am a one-album-per-month sort of music listener. I make playlists but often opt for the album instead when I put my headphones on. To me, albums are very special. Obviously, they’re collections of songs ordered in a certain way by an artist. When I listen to an album in full, in order, it feels like I’m respecting the music by listening to it how the creator intended. I love how a good album takes you into a cohesive sonic world where different songs bring you into various emotions and stories, all with a consistent flavor.
My favorite part about whole album repeat listening is that my favorite song the first couple listens is rarely my favorite by the time I move on. I love to be surprised by music I’ve heard many times when I notice something new or exciting that my ears missed.
Baby’s First Streaming Service
In middle school, my mom got an Apple Music subscription for the whole family. For those of you unfamiliar, Apple Music functions so that the first page you see when you enter the app is your recently added albums. This setup, I believe, was what first led me to whole album listening. I have never been a Spotify user but from what I can glean, it is very single-forward as opposed to project-forward. It feeds you song after song with algorithms that have defined an entire generation’s listening habits.
As a maker of music myself, one of my big goals is to make an amazing album. One for the books. Ideally, people would enjoy the work as a whole, giving every song a shot to be their favorite. I want my album to immerse the listener in a warm hug of sound and nostalgia.
How Do Artists Get Money?
Spotify (and Apple Music and others) treat artists not as vendors but as middle-men. The money they make is from ads and subscription fees, but they go incredibly out of their way to make sure the artist sees as little of that money as possible. Spotify is vague on their website1, citing large figures, like “$10 billion in 2024” in payouts, while never mentioning the actual cents per stream. I can’t find an official-looking source, but a quick search will leave you seeing that somewhere around $0.004 USD per stream is the consensus2. Spotify’s website says that there actually isn’t a direct money-per-stream rate and that it “might vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors”.
I have no idea what that means.
Something that’s come up recently that has me shaken to my very core is the onset of AI music onto these big platforms. Completely bot-made music is being released and promoted on algorithmic playlists by Spotify3. This is problematic because soon giants like Spotify and Apple Music could cut out the middle man (read: artist) completely, relying on robots to make and recommend music while they sit back in their comfy office chairs raking in our cash and attention.
How Not to Feed the Beast
Setups like this really rub me the wrong way. The more I understand economics (which, let’s be frank, is not much), the more I want to put my money in artists’ pockets as directly as I can. It’s like shopping from a local store instead of buying from Amazon: something to feel good about.
Enter Bandcamp. I first heard about it alongside websites like SoundCloud, where artists will go just to throw something up and see how it does, but I’ve since realized there’s a lot more to it than that.
Bandcamp allows me to do exactly what I want to do: Pay an artist for their music. It allows me to listen to entire songs before you buy/download them (with a 4-song limit, I think? Or I just use YouTube) and then pay what I want for the song. Most artists (like myself!) leave it at the standard $1 or $2 per track, but some make it entirely free to download. The game-changer for me is that I can make an “additional fan contribution” when I buy a song or an album, allowing me to send my favorite artist some real cold hard cash (like five dollars or something!) that I know will go to them. Bandcamp takes something like 20%, which you might think is a lot, but compared to Spotify, there’s just no competition.
Would you pay a dollar for a song you listen to every day at the gym? (Bandcamp allows you to make playlists, too, thank goodness!) I certainly would.
You would have to stream a song upwards of 250 times for an artist to get $1 with the $0.004/stream figure. That’s a lot of rotations.
The only caveat is that many popular artists don’t release their music on Bandcamp yet. I say “yet” because I think, with more awareness, it’ll be a no-brainer both for artists and labels. “Brat” by charlixcx is not on Bandcamp, you’ve been warned. As soon as it is, though, she’ll get my $10. I think sites like these are still worth transitioning to, even if some of your favorite music isn’t on there yet. As it increases in popularity, soon more and more will be on Bandcamp. But for now, you should support the artists you love that are on there with your hard-earned $1. And maybe even find some new music!
For now, I’m still on Apple Music but have been transitioning slowly to Bandcamp listening. It’ll take me a while to buy all the albums I want to buy, but for now, my goal is to download a new album on Bandcamp to be my next album-of-the-month. Suggestions welcome.
A reminder from me that my DEBUT EP comes out on Friday, July 11th!!! Presave it on your evil streaming platform of choice (lol) here
you can also preorder the vinyl (my first ever vinyl!!) with the studio versions on side A and the live versions on side B here
“Royalties” page from “Spotify for Artists” https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/royalties/
and some linked graphics
https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/#takeaway-1
A helpful (and quite scholarly!) take on Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/13djsl9/how_much_do_artists_make_on_spotify_case_studies/
An article about AI music on Spotify
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-ai-music-problem-on-spotify-and-other-streaming-platforms-is-worse-than-you-think/
I am a whole-album listener, too. I agree, I love the whole experience of a start-to-finish album listen. I love how when I've listened to an album over and over, as one song ends I'm already anticipating the start of the next song.
I've never used Spotify, but I'm a longtime bandcamp user. I love the pay what you want option and Bandcamp Friday. I hope more artists start using bandcamp. I was super excited to find you on there. :-)
I'm discovering a lot of new music through TikTok these days (including you), the algorithm knows my music taste I suppose. But often times the artist only has a few songs out and not as one cohesive album (yet), again not unlike yourself until Friday.
I absolutely love listening to a whole album if I already like multiple songs from that artist and there's an album available. LPD's Hatchling being the most recent example (frankly, listening to The Affliction _without_ Andrew's Favorite Part right after feels sacrilegious).
But in a way I had accepted that maybe we're moving into an era where there's less focus on albums and it's more about single songs. That does seem to fit more with the social media landscape of short form media that can "go viral" and what not.
I also feel that there should be no shame in enjoying something the way you want. Don't finish a book if you don't like it, or read the last chapter first, substitute ingredients from a recipe, watch parts of a movie on mute. I've skipped chapters in one of my favorite books and there's an album that I only listen to the back half of. John Green has said multiple times that when one of his books is released, it's no longer his and I agree with that.
That said, when an album DOES make me want to listen to it start to finish, undivided attention, that artist gets a special place in my heart. RHCP's Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Muse's Origin Of Symmetry come to mind.
As mentioned, you did it with Hatchling and I'm very much looking forward to your new album! And I'm definitely resurrecting my old Bandcamp account to buy it there as well.