DiY is not anti-DEI

I dont wanna hear that the scene is dead.

~Shilpa Ray, The Meadows, March 20th, 2025

As Spotify has helped push people in their own musical bubbles, it has simultaneously been accused of damaging authentic and independent music, both by cutting into revenue streams on recordings to pigeonholing listeners to prevent them from exploring anything outside of what Spotify directs them to listen to, which is best summed up by a Yale Professor's thesis on the subject:

This means that Spotify is likely to satisfy its users immediate, first order aesthetic preferences needs...rather than their higher order aspirational needs.

Yet, is that really the case? In 2018, 87% of music streamed on Spotify came from the "Big 3" labels (some of which was technically indie music like R.EM. or Sonic Youth), but that has since drastically changed. Slowly but surely the grasp of the major labels lessened on Spotify, until it was announced that in 2023 Spotify paid out 50% of royalties to independent labels (a number that was unchanged for 2024) and currently claims that there are 275,000 musicians that made at least $1,000 in revenue in 2024 from their platform, a feat which requires around 250,000 streams. In truth, there are many more independent musicians who are getting heard and finding an audience allowing them greater recognition and the ability to tour nationally and internationally than ever before. And if this one Bluesky user is to be believed:

there are still plenty of artists making $50,000 or more.

So why the persistent belief that streaming has killed the industry?

let me say this once now, and then ill say it again:

THE PERSISTENT BELIEF THAT STREAMING HAS MADE MUSIC, AND SPECIFICALLY INDIE MUSIC, WORSE IS BECAUSE MANY PEOPLE SIMPLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT

This is everyone, from professors at Yale, to music journalists, to artists themselves.

If you asked these people how many bands in 2005 had received 250,000 plays on any medium (aka a 10 song album being played 25,000 times), they would have no idea. I dont either, but I am going to predict it was a lot less than 275,000 bands. Looking at actual data from 2005 it indicates that there were 500 albums that sold 200,00 copies and 948 albums that sold more than 100,00 copies. Doing some complex math that assumes a similar rate of descent among the next most popular bands, you could guestimate around 5k-7.5k total bands sold at least 25,000 copies of an album, and around 10k-15k that sold 10,000 copies. That seems like a lot, until you compare it to a bigger number like say...275k.

Now of course selling an album financially meant a lot more. Typically indie bands enjoyed a higher split of revenue from albums sold, meaning 10k-20k of album sales could mean $50k-$100k payday for the band, which, while being a far cry from a rockstar income, is much more than earned via 250K in streams (approx $1,000). Yet this doesnt take into account many things that are different about a Spotify stream. For one, even if someone just "tries" your music you get paid, while if someone checked your record on the listening station but didnt buy you got nada. Of course considering it would take the tracks on your album being listened to 1,500-2,000 times to equal the money made from a single album sale, so if you were selling a decent number of albums under the old system, streaming certainly hurt you. Though bands also were temporaly constrained since eventually your album would be pulled from shelves or regulated to the discount bin meaning you would pretty much stop earning after 1 or 2 years. Not to mention promoting a tour to a fan base of a few tens of thousands of fans nationwide was gonna be pretty difficult endeavor.

Still the bigger challenge for independent bands though was getting anyone to listen to them in the first place. Because a potential fan did have to fork over $10-$15 for an album, listeners were very selective with what they listened to, and it was generally highly based on what they were familiar with. Hearing an album you liked at a friends house was unlikely going to motivate you to buy it yourself, and while everyone treasured having a few "underground" bands they supported, most of their collection would be from promoted bands, which meant label backing was a necessity. Most artist were unable to escape their geographic location, be it their state or country, since simply placing your record in the appropriate section of a store with cool album art was unlikely to net significant sales. You needed press releases and airplay to get people to separate from their hard earned cash for your artistic whinging. Touring as an opener for a bigger (and often less talented) band was mainly an opportunity to get signed as opposed to organically finding a fan base among the audience. As much as labels hurt the scene by controlling which music received sufficient play and coverage to sell albums, they were a necessity for any kind of large distribution.

Oh that's cool, but nah

Though prior to high speed internet connections, which didnt become ubiquitous until 2005-2010, even if Spotify had existed (which it has since 2006), most people would not have been able to receive unlimited streaming, and at best Spotify could have been a Netflix like service offering to send you, depending on the time period*, 2 vinyls/8-tracks/cassettes/CDs/MP3s/vinyls a month. Even after the rise of internet distribution with services like iTunes, this failed to really solve the problem of smaller bands getting fans because even if you could upload your globally music for cheap, no one one was going to spend any money, even $1.00, to listen to your song if they didnt know who you were. Platform-wide "conservative listening" would mean recommendations for obscure genres and artists would be limited.

So the problem was 2-fold: you didnt just need distribution as a smaller band to be heard you needed discoverability.

You cant have discoverability if your listeners dont have complete freedom to discover. If you make the cost of listening to an unknown band anything at all besides the length of a song, most people simply wont, which brings us to the paradox of everyone calling into question the current scene:

People want a free and open scene were music can be easily discovered, but they want to put in place barriers that prevent people from doing that.

And no, it doesnt matter if Bandcamp give you 300 free downloads a month. That means if you have over 300 people who discover your band recently, most simply wont pay once the wall goes up. It doesnt matter if you give them 3x, 10x, or even 100x** free listens, if you make them choose early on they will mostly decide "its nice, but not nice enough" and just stop listening. In my first few years of using Spotify my discovery was driven by the fact I could listen to a song 4 half-dozen times, but, on the 25th time, decide it was the worst song that ever existed and curse it to Hades, and nothing was lost. Stories of people forcing themselves to repeatedly listen to albums that caused them pain because they dropped $15 on it are ubiquitous, which is basically the idea behind fin-dommes.

Idk about you, but that's not the kind of relationship I like to engage in with my artists. Real artists want to be heard first, supported second, which is exactly what streaming allows. Rather than making fans "bet" on which bands they will really like, they give the fan all the time in the world to make that decision, which believe me, you'll need.

Though this implies the other angle of attack by. critic of the current scene: musicians being forced to "give away" their music for free to build a capitalizable fanbase is inherently discriminatory since only bands who do not need a substantive income from performing can afford to keep making music.

Well once again I am calling on your ability to analyze the current indie scene and compare it to the old one:

THERE HAS NEVER EVER BEEN A TIME WHEN THE MAJORITY OF CREATIVE AND TALENTED BANDS HAVE MADE A FULL TIME LIVING FROM THEIR MUSIC.

There was just a time when more well known bands did decently, while the lesser known ones did diddly. Arguing this on the internet I was linked to this tik-tok channel that supposedly highlights how only prep-school kids are able to make music in the modern era. The irony? Most of the bands the channel talks about are from the pre-streaming era. Note to people: rich kids have always had an upper hand in getting recognized and known for making art. A few bands getting A&R contracts did not change that. Most indie bands from the past, just like today, made music and toured around their fairly normal careers but, unlike today, broke up in obscurity, rather than the streaming era where they break up in relative obscurity after headlining a tour that loses money. That's progress.

Here I thought Ok Go was just being ironic

Another thread I have happened upon (as a fully fledged Bluesky user) was regarding queer indie artists. The thing is though I had actually come across many of the artists (Baths, Jamila Woods, Model/Actriz, TORRES, Arthur Russell, Moses Sumney, MUNA, Body Void, Meshell Ndgegeocell, etc.), but none of them in the context of being part of queer music specifically, instead I was sent these artists much like my non-queer ones: one song at a time, and part of a particular genre of non specified sexuality. And while Discover Strongly only sends me a marginal amount of progressive hip hop, by simply looking up artists I already know and going to the similar ones at the bottom of their page, I have been able to consistently find great Afro-Futurist music, in addition to sniping an artist or two from other user playlists. Similarly Spotify has showered me with progressive soul and global music, particularly over the past 2.5 years suggesting they maybe revised their algorithms to encourage more "aspirational" listening.

In short, I dont think Spotify encourages a lack of diversity, especially not compared to the radio and MTV days which only allowed a certain number of bands and styles to be popular at any given time, it simply makes it easier for fans of non-diverse music to stay within that frame if they so choose. If you have any inclination to leave your bubble, or at least expand it, Spotify has the tools to do that .

So ill say it again:

THE PERSISTENT BELIEF THAT STREAMING HAS MADE MUSIC, AND SPECIFICALLY INDIE MUSIC, WORSE IS BECAUSE MANY PEOPLE SIMPLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT

If you so much as imply that the music scene is declining, Im gonna set Shilpa Ray on you, and believe me you do not want to be at the end of a Shilpa live yelling sesh:

The dead indie music scene

*Note: I have been forced to stop using the word "era" due to a copyright claim by Taylor Swift's legal team.

**Ok, maybe 100x would be different.