Our Spotify Experience (Score 4, Informative)

Spotify has been an interesting experiment for my band, The Wee Lollies (shameless plug - www.theweelollies.com). A single stream garners us a mere $0.0046. Three streams pays out $0.0199. I don't really understand that math, but it is what it is I guess.

All told for 2013, we've earned about 28 cents from Spotify. Granted, we're not a national band, we're not on a label, and we're probably mediocre by most folks' standards. So people aren't rushing to add us to their playlists.

So the takeaway for us is that Spotify isn't really an income tool for new bands. You already have to be quite successful for Spotify to give you enough plays to earn enough to pay for, say, lunch at Taco Bell. It's not even a decent exposure tool as our stream count is way low. We really expected more organic plays. We're kind of surprised that that didn't happen.

At this point we're still on Spotify because, well, why not? As an artist, you want to make it easy for folks to hear your material. But the reality is from a business perspective, it doesn't make sense. After you account for your own time and energy keeping track of everything, it's really a negative return.