Beyond Streaming Platforms: A Revolutionary Path for Emerging Musicians

Create Your Own Music Monetization

Record companies in the U.S. and abroad have the advantage of scale when it comes to music streaming platforms. They have the means to invest up to $150,000 in marketing a new artist and work out a better streaming deal with Spotify and other streaming platforms to make sure that their artist’s songs are positioned prominently in a particular genre within their platforms. This ensures that the major music recording companies will get the most music streams for their artists and reward themselves with the highest returns.

Unless you’re lucky enough to get a decent music recording deal or you have $150,000 lying around your apartment for marketing, it will be next to impossible to compete with mainstream record companies unless you beat them at their own game with your very own inexpensive streaming app that charges a ridiculously low monthly fee of $1.75 to listen to you and other artists you sign up to your platform. This may sound extremely low, but it gets independent artists like yourself the highest return for every song played. Starting this streaming platform can break even on personal music production quickly and you will start to view other music streaming platforms as just marketing tools to gain followers and paying fans.

Revenue Per 1,000 Song Streams

On average, Spotify pays $.003 to $0.005 per song played on their app in the United States to independent artists. If any of these artists were able to get 1,000 plays of their song on Spotify’s streaming service in the US, they would only make, at the most, $5.00 (that’s if they don’t have to share that revenue with producers and other writers). In contrast, you can make the same amount of money with only 6% of that number of plays by creating or joining a multiple-artist-owned streaming app. Furthermore, your super fans would only pay $1.75 a month for your app to listen to you and other similar artists in high definition. That’s in high contrast to paying $11 a month for a platform like Spotify or $20 a month for Tidal’s Hi-Definition app. Every artist who joins your app will make up to 60 times more per song played on your app than most other streaming services.

How To Attract Other Artists And Their Fans Quickly

You will have to attract other artists to your app and convince them to ask their fans to download and pay for it. Normally, this would be a hard ask. Sometimes, artists can’t see the big picture because they want to take the traditional route and only share their music or podcast with the mainstream platforms. Artists would love to make a lot more with their music, but why would they ask their fans to trust your app that only has a few other artists on your platform?

I believe I have the answer to the problem. If you give artists a 10% revenue share on all the other artist’s songs their fans listen to on your app, including the amazing return of $0.08 of their own song plays, you pretty much turn that new artist into a part owner of the app’s service. The more fans they convince to join the service, the more money they’ll make, even if their fans are listening to other artists on the app.

Have Your App Go Viral

With just a handful of artists, you can attract hundreds of fans per week when other artists upload songs to your app. Include podcasters. Those artists and podcasters will have a special link with tracking for their fans to use to connect with the app. This ensures that their fans are counted per stream to calculate their revenue. By marketing the app to their fans on social media, live shows, word of mouth, and other means, they can attract hundreds of paying fans to the app. In just a few months, you could have up to 3000 monthly paying app listeners. As an artist, you and others can offer discounts on merchandise and tickets to live shows and make them available on the app as an extra incentive to get even more fans to sign up for the paid version.

The Low Cost of The Experience Is The Key

Most fans would gladly pay $1.75 a month to support a local artist they follow. It is such an insignificant amount that most people wouldn’t notice it being deducted monthly from their bank account. In reality, it’s almost an absurdly low cost for a streaming service. Doubling the cost wouldn’t be that much of a problem, but if a very low cost is so attractive, how can someone honestly say no to paying for your music streaming app?

Wait! 8 Cents Is Just A Few Listens Per User

You are dealing with averages. Users of the app will probably go crazy listening to their favorite songs on the app for the first week, then it will die down more and more as time goes on. Some will use the app throughout the day, every day, while others will barely remember they even have the app at all. It’s how workout gyms stay in business. Only a small percentage of a gym’s patrons show up to exercise on a regular basis, while everyone else goes to the gym just a few times a year. Again, most of your fans wouldn’t even notice a $1.75 monthly charge in their bank account.

Creating The App

Expensive? Not really. Difficult to create? Not at all. There are templates for making artist-owned apps with multiple artist payout features that already exist. In fact, these templates allow you to make your own version of your streaming app to accommodate your musical niche.

As an aspiring musician, you can develop a music app similar to Spotify. However, the prospect of beginning from scratch and either learning to code or employing a professional to build a music app similar to Spotify can be hard and expensive. With a no-code app builder, you can effortlessly create an app resembling Spotify with all the features you want, all without the need for coding, and it only takes a few minutes.

There’s No Magic Number

In reality, it doesn’t matter if you have 100 or 20,000 fans. When you and other artists are making 60 times more than other streaming services, they will want to help you succeed. Even if you are the only artist on the app for the moment, with just a few fans, you will definitely make enough income to justify the true cost of producing music on your terms – and maybe even your rent.