It's Only Five Million Streams, What's The Big Deal?

We're tracking the making of a brand new live record from start to finish. In this installment, let's take a look at just how massive an audience we would need on Spotify just to cover costs.

Last week, I announced that I will be documenting the entire process of making and releasing my forthcoming live record with the Wild Honey Collective. As I confessed in my introductory piece, this is a massive project with a truly bare bones budget.

The entirety of the musicians and crew that will help me pull off this show and its recording/filming are comprised of longtime friends and collaborators who are willing to invest in this project with me for a pitifully small paycheck. Basically, these are consummate professionals at their chosen craft, but because they are friends, they’ll end up working for little more than free.

There are also some professional craftsmen and women that we will need to work with us on this project who are not friends, and as such we’ll have to pay the professional going rate. I wish I was in a position to pay the going rate to my friends who were working on this project, too.

As I mentioned in the original piece, one of the benefits of paying professionals for mixing, mastering, or promotion is the possibility for networking with other folks in the record industry that could be beneficial for this release, or the future of my career. The music business, like any other, is built largely on relationships. If we can pay great engineers and publicists to do the work we need for the release, and make a few connections along the way, it helps to add value to money we have no choice but to spend. That said, we’ll be sure to use each penny wisely.

About a third of this budget is devoted to the production of physical merchandise and promotional materials. A bit more is allocated to the purchase of some very humble video gear. It might be fair to say that the cost of physical merch ought not to be calculated into streaming payouts. However, because this project is being recorded and filmed at a live show means that we can record the entire album of songs and film the event without paying a dime for studio costs.

If this were a conventional album, it is conceivable that the entire $16,000 budget I have presented here would be eaten up just in studio and post-production costs; Meaning that any capital needed for promotion, vinyl, merch, or promo items would all be additional costs.

In fact, an artist working in a modestly priced studio environment would need to work quickly to finish an entire record on a budget like this. We’re planning to make the record, shoot a film, press vinyl, pay a PR firm, hire mixing and mastering engineers with name recognition, and put this damned thing up on Spotify all for roughly sixteen grand. I’ll stand back and watch anyone else who wants to give that a shot take their crack.

So, we’ve got our figure of $16,000 for better or worse. Now, let’s say we’re hoping to break it big on Spotify and pay the production costs with streaming royalties alone. How many streams would it take to make that happen?

Well, the answer is roughly 5,333,333 streams.

Wait, How Many Streams Again?

Yep, at a shade more than three cents a stream - which is Spotify’s average rate for artists not pulling in massive numbers like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, or Beyonce - it would take 5.3 million spins on the Spotify app to pay for just the production and release costs of a new record. Again, our budget is bargain basement because it is almost all being done on a DIY level, but with professional gear and a very talented crew working for almost nothing. Still, we gotta find more than five million streams just to pay the costs of this thing.

Even if we amortized those listens out over the course of an entire year, it would take nearly 442,000 streams per month just to cover our modest production costs. It is tough to pinpoint exactly how many artists currently on Spotify reach this threshold on a regular basis, but the rough data indicates that just 1 to 2% of the total number of artists on the platform that are pulling in these sorts of monthly stream rates.

According to a study done by Music Business Worldwide, less than 20% of Spotify artists had more than 1,000 listens per month. At 1,000 monthly streams, enough traction to place you in the top 20% of all artists on the platform, an artist would earn about $3.00 for their work, minus any fees from the required banking transfers from Spotify to a digital distributor and then on to the artist. Let me reiterate that a payout of $3.00 per month lands you in the top 20% of artists in terms of financial rewards on the platform.

According to reporting from iGroove, there are just 6,000 total artists with 500,000 monthly listeners. Obviously, listeners are likely to listen to more than one song one time in a given month, so we might not need that many unique listeners. But even if we dropped that listener threshold to 50,000 monthly listeners each listening to any of my songs ten times per month, that would put us in a class with something like 64,000 other artists worldwide. That might seem like a lot, but it’s less than 1% of all of the artists on Spotify.

Sure, it’s fair to say that millions of Spotify tracks are made by hobbyists and folks who have no expectation of making a living with their music. Still, there are more who are doing work so avant-garde and difficult that it will likely never find a wide enough of an audience to garner any sort of payday. There is also work on the platform that just plain sucks.

What you will also find are thousands of artists doing great work at a highly professional level who are making almost no splash on Spotify at all. And it’s hard to blame them for not trying harder to increase their numbers. My work remains on Spotify and receives almost no listenership because I have zero incentive to drive my audience to a place where they can listen to my music without ever having to pay for it. It’s like encouraging the farmer to grow more and more corn as the corn prices continue to plummet. You’re just asking musicians to double down on a platform that will likely never reward them.

Even if we can miraculously formulate this endeavor into millions of streams, it will only pay the barest of costs. I hear music fans talk all the time about how touring and merch are the new lifeblood for the independent musician. They are correct in some ways, and these fans often have the very best of intentions, but it’s often easy to overlook just how much it costs to record and promote that record that you get for practically free. And most fans have no idea just how expensive it is to order large amounts of vinyl, t-shirts, CDs, and posters before ever selling a stitch.

This Is Only Covering Costs

It’s also crucial to remember that our $16,000 figure, or those 5.3 million streams we’re chasing, won’t pay me a damned thing. They’ll pay me nothing for my songs, my experience, my talent, or my voice. It won’t put an additional dime back into the pockets of the folks who played on, and recorded the album. It won’t help to pay for advertising to help sell the record. It won’t pay my mortgage, or buy groceries. Those millions of streams simply cover the costs to get it into the world in the first place.

It’ll take 5.3 Million streams just to cover the cost of the ticket to the fair.

If I expected to makea modest living wage from my Spotify revenue, I would need get myself into the top 0.005% of artists. You read that right. No matter how professional, catchy, or well performed your music might be, your chances of making a living on Spotify are only slightly better than the chances of you being drafted to play center for the Detroit Pistons.

To make just $40,000 a year room my music before any costs were covered, I would need to generate more than 1.1 million streams a month. Now, imagine how that math works for a band with four members. That number starts to look like 5 million streams a month to reach that salary for a full band. And once again, this is before any production or promotion costs are covered. In other words, this is all earnings beyond our meager $16,000 budget and our 5.3 Million streams.

We will need to begin spending our budget as early as October of this year. We’re on the verge of announcing our fundraising details as we seek to raise the full 16k, but I have to confess that I am scared shitless to announce and unveil this whole thing. My cynicism tells me that we will probably never raise the $16,000 we need. My romanticism tells me that it’s possible.

My history making records has been to believe that this next record will be “the one” that captures the attention of enough people to make this at least a healthy portion of a full-time living. I have been wrong every single time. Is there some reason to believe that this will actually be different? If I believe that this time will be different, is it because I choose to believe, or because there is evidence to support that conclusion? Each passing album feels more like a flight of fancy than a genuine attempt at a career in the music industry.

While it has never been about about fame or fortune, I can safely say in middle age that all I long for out of this endeavor is to be able to live a modest, comfortable life and do the work that I am meant to do. My hope, and my plan, is to make that happen through a combination of my work here at WAIM, as well as my recording and touring work as a singer/songwriter. If I could earn $40,000 or $50,000 per year doing that work, I would consider myself incredibly lucky. Even half of that would alleviate some of the pressure form driving rideshare six days a week.

Looking at the data from Spotify, it’s impossible to think I will ever get to a point making my living on that platform unless there are major changes to their payout structure, or I suddenly land an opening slot on the next Jason Isbell tour and my career explodes from there. Neither of those outcomes seem particularly likely at this juncture.

The Uphill Climb

The very act of trying to make a living as an independent artist is a Sisyphean task. It is likely that I will never get to a point where my work as a musician makes me a full time living, but that doesn't mean that it isn’t worth pursuing. In combining my touring, my recording, my writing, traveling, podcasting, and radio shows, I am hoping to create a body of work that is the result of a life well lived. I just wanna find a way to pay the bills along the way.

Despite the fact that Spotify will likely not garner any noticeable financial reward, I am going to work hard to make the most of the streaming game. I have talked with experts in the industry who are much sunnier about streaming than I am. Perhaps I have a bad attitude about the whole thing. The least I could do is give it the old college try and see what happens.

So, as a part of the process of making and releasing this live record, we’ll be pushing listeners to find us on streaming platforms. Then, we’ll track all of that data to see just how many spins we can rack up to see just exactly how much money that ends up being worth in real dollars.

The other advantage of following this whole process through to streaming is that you will see firsthand how long it takes to get paid for making a record, if you are even lucky to make money on it at all. I announced this project in May. It was in the work for a full month before that. We’ll have rehearsals, pre-production work, crew meetings, promotion efforts, and loads more to deal with leading up to the show. Even if we work quickly, the process of making, pressing, and releasing an album is a time-intensive process.

With our current production schedule, I would not expect that we would have a finished record to release until well into the second half of 2026. My best guess at this point would be September, 2026, but that could certainly fluctuate a bit in either direction.

Why Does It Take So Long To Release A Record?

You might be asking yourself, why in the Hell does it take ten months to put out after you play the show when it was recorded?

I am so glad that you asked.

You have already seen a bit of the work that we’ll be doing before the show ever happens. But even after we have finished the show, there is still a ton of work to be done.

First, we’ll have to organize and archive all of the recordings so that they can be delivered to our mixing engineer. Once we have completed files ready for the mixer, we will work with their schedule to complete the process of mixing the disparate recorded tracks into finished songs. Depending on the availability of our mixing engineer, it’s likely that this process will take roughly 1-2 months.

Once we have finished mixes, we’ll need to send those files and a finished song sequence - the order that the songs will appear on the album - to the mastering engineer. Mastering is a process involving compression, equalization, and limiting to make the songs on the record sound more cohesive. Assuming we can coordinate the scheduling of the mixing and the mastering, we should be able to turn a finished master around in a month, or perhaps even less. Let’s be safe and say that takes a month.

So, if we assume our post-production work finishes roughly according to schedule, we would have a finished version of the record in digital form by April 1, 2026. At this point, with a finished record to begin sharing with reviewers, writers, radio programmers, and bloggers, we can put our PR team into action.

The normal release schedule for a full album cycle is roughly six months. There are about four months of pushing the album to various outlets, and building momentum up until release day. This is then usually followed by about two months of follow-up work looking to secure more radio play, placement in curated playlists on streaming platforms, features and interviews in prominent magazines and blogs, as well as live filmed appearances on larger showcase shows like NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, or similar shows curated and produced for YouTube by community radio stations like KEXP and KCRW.

With this math, if we have a finished record in the can by April 1, 2026, we won’t be able to release it any earlier than August 1, 2026 to adhere to the four month PR schedule before the release date. The only way to move up the release date any earlier in the year would be to finish the mixing and mastering on a faster schedule. While it seems possible that the record might not take a full three months to mix and master, it is a completely reasonable schedule when working with professionals looking for time in their already busy schedules to work on our project.

You might ask, well can’t you start promoting the record before you have finished mixes? The simple answer is NO. If the publicist doesn't have a song or two to share with a writer or editor that might want to cover our record, we will look like rank amateurs. We won’t have finished songs until we have the full master of the record in our hands. Which brings us back to April 1.

Let’s Get Physical

A finished digital master of the album also means that we can ship off the files to get started with the processes of pressing vinyl and printing CDs. The CD end of the job is remarkably quick. Unless there are major setbacks in production, we will easily have CDs in hand less than a month, on this schedule we’d have them before Mother’s Day. That shit is cheap and easy. I wish everyone bought the damned things.

Vinyl pressing is the polar opposite of CD production. The process is time intensive, expensive, complicated, and intimidating; even for those of us who have done it more than once. Normal production time on a vinyl record right now is at least 16 weeks, or roughly four months. This means that the vinyl production schedule is roughly the same timeframe as our publicity schedule leading up to release day, assuming it all goes to plan.

Making vinyl records, even in today’s technically marvelous world can be a difficult and sometimes messy process. Old school techniques like plating and lacquering are still required for pressing vinyl, and these processes require the printing of what are known as test pressings. Essentially, these are samples of the finished vinyl record to be played by the folks making and releasing the record to ensure that they are satisfied with the sonic end result. These test pressings can often find errors and issues in the master recordings and can require additional mastering, or even remixing to correct. This of course, sets the clock back on the production schedule. One might also run into a bad plate or a faulty lacquer and then the process needs to be repeated again, further slowing down production.

Many artists these days are so frustrated by four to six month production schedules for vinyl that they’re releasing albums digitally a few weeks prior to a physical release date on vinyl, CD, or cassette. For example, a band might announce their new album will be released on streaming platforms on May 1st, but vinyl and CDs won’t be available until Sept. 1st.

That approach might work for artists with a larger fanbase, or for those who have a bigger platform. For artists not in the top 1%, it is completely foolish to separate the releases. It is just watering down a message that is already tough enough to sell.

Based on all of these parameters, we would be very lucky to have finished vinyl in our hands by August 1. Similarly, August 1 is the quickest date by which we could complete a PR push before the release. This date however, would not allow us one day of wiggle room if were we to run into a snag during production of the physical product. Nor does it account for us taking longer than three months to complete mixing and mastering. In essence, there is no breathing room at all. That can only lead to disaster.

Summer is also a terrible time to release a new record. Most music fans are off at the beach, out on vacation, or simply staving off the summer heat. A new August release often falls flat no matter how great the record might be. A September release date would likely find a more focused audience than one in late Summer. Plus, it would pad our schedule by a few precious weeks in case we were to hit any snags along the way.

Looking at the calendar a full fourteen months from where we stand today, I am eyeing the 18th of September as our launch date. This would give us about six weeks of additional room for mixing, mastering, promotion, and vinyl pressing. I first announced this show back in May of 2025. It had been in the works for a full month prior. That means if this all goes according to plan, it will take about 17 months to go from idea to reality. Ain’t nothing quick about this.

What We Know So Far

It’s gonna take more than 5 Million streams to make our $16,000 budget back from Spotify royalties. It is pretty obvious that this is an uphill climb. Still, we’ll be making a full throated effort to make the most of the Spotify game and I’ll report back every detail to you along the way.

The record is likely going to see a release in September of 2026. This timeline includes a window of three months to mix and master the album, as well as a four month pre-release PR campaign. Additionally, there is a minimum wait time of four months for vinyl pressing, making a mid-September release the earliest option without cutting things incredibly close.

From the moment that I first began working on this idea in April of 2025 until we have a finished record released into the worlds going to take at least 17 months. This is a lengthy and ambitious project, but it’s a very accurate depiction of an independent artist trying to do all of this on a bare bones budget.

If you think it takes forever to get vinyl pressed, wait until you see how long it takes to get paid from the streaming services. It might seem insane to have to wait until September of 2026 to have a finished record hit the streets, but I likely won’t see any digital royalties until well into 2027, if I ever see them at all.

That story and more next time in our series on the real costs of record making.

Cheers,
Matty C