There is always two truths that never changes in the music industry: first is that the only certain thing about music industry is constant change, and the second one is that bands and labels always lie in their interviews that there is no money in X and how Y is killing music (be it downloads, piracy or streaming killing radio and record sales, and that there is no money in record sales, only in live gigs, no money in live gigs either etc). And one of the biggest lie is that you won't make any money by streaming music, even tho it is the primary way for many people to listen to music. And these both are straight tied to the title of this post.
So the good news first: I bought myself my dream amp (or at least one of them), that I've wanted for almost 10 years now, a Vox AC30. The amplifier in question is a classic rock amplifier used by countless bands such as Queen, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Muse, Wolfmother and countless other. Here is the thing if you want to see it:
Bands complain how they do not make "any" money from streaming. And there is several posts that show this too. But I want to disagree with that. How I got this amplifier is by listening to music. For one hour. Yes, I made several hundred euros by listening to music. By putting on a pair of headphones, streaming myself to YouTube, commenting and listening to AC/DC's album "Rock or Bust". My channel nor the stream itself was not popular, there was way under 100 viewers during the stream and my channel has under 5000 subscribers, and mainly focuses on doing weekly audio production tutorials. But somehow the video became the most watched video on my channel with over 140 000 views at the time of writing this post. The video made me more money than all of my other 300 videos on my channel in the past 6 months. Combined.
But then it occurred to me why the video became so popular and why I made so much money from it. There is at least 3 reasons to it:
1 - Location, Location, Location. AC/DC is not on Spotify. This means that people who aren't willing to buy it from iTunes or other webstores would have to download the album illegally or try to stream it from somewhere else, and since YouTube is the most popular streaming platform in the world... That's where my video was too.
2 - I intentionally made the video look like how people would search for it. I used the album art on the thumbnail, used Artist name - "album" full album in the title (the title being in this case ACDC "Rock Or Bust" Full album listening party) and the video was longer than 20 minutes, so it seemed like the album.
3 - I placed ads at the strategic locations, aka pre-roll ads, added a jump annotation to about 30 seconds before the album listening part starts, then added an ad about 20 seconds from there. Then when people realize they don't hear the music, because that would be a copyright infringement on my part, they get disappointed, click on the dislike button and start to call me a homosexual on the comment section (which btw doesn't hurt my feelings at all, since all the gay people I know are possibly the coolest people in the world). And in case someone would've actually listened the whole thing, I also added post-roll ads, but I highly doubt anyone saw those.
Well, I tried to replicate this success with other albums; I also listened to the new Nickelback album before the ACDC album, and it got about 45 000 views, which also helped my load with a nice amount of money (exact number, doesn't really matter; it's over $25 and under $200 at the time of writing this post, and the number is constantly changing due to YouTube CPM fluctuation and increasing view count). But after that I listened to Smashing Pumpkins, Dir En Grey, Angels And Airwaves, and the new Nicki Minaj albums. To my surprise, the Smashing Pumpkins album out of all these has made the least views; under 1000 in two weeks.
So, as we can see, there is still money in streaming. You just need to monetize it and make yourself popular. There is no money in it, if nobody cares about you.
Check the video here. It's boring if you don't have the album, so go and buy it here.
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