After 10 years we're finally going on Spotify, which I know will come as music to the ears to many of our fans (excuse the pun). We've famously avoided the streaming service like the plague, initially making a stand against something that is so ludicrously lopsided in favour of the music platform as to make it barely worth anything to the artist. And for a band with as modest a reach as us, it's about as worthless as an ashtray on a motorbike, financially speaking of course.
To paint a picture of just how paltry the split is, Spotify pays the artist £0.0031 per stream, meaning it will take 300 streams of a song to generate just £1. Or, to highlight just how desperate it is, if we had monetised our 81 thousand plays on SoundCloud to date, we would have earned a whopping £250 over 10 years. £25 a year. Or just £2.08 a month. Between 5 of us that's 41p, which couldn't even buy you a chocolate bar 10 years ago. So you can see the numbers need to be almost immeasurable for it to be worthwhile income. Of course all money is worthwhile, if not for us, then for someone else it can be the difference between life and death, so when you look it like that, it does make for sober reading; "for just £2 a month..."
But we didn't save a life, instead we made a stand, alongside our peers Coldplay, Prince and Neil Young. And naturally our continued boycott has really affected Spotify and I can't tell you the amount of times we have declined their many inroads and invitations to make peace.
In later years when our stubbornness had worn down, it was duly replaced with laziness; the idea of uploading whole albums and signing various forms became another one of those jobs that never gets done, like defrosting the freezer or dusting the book shelves. I've lost count of the amount of times I attempted to do it, read the 'how to' guide, watched the 'introduction' video and then got easily sidetracked by any number of really important things like social media validation and sports results!
People kept saying, why aren't you on Spotify? We can't find you on Spotify? And we'd smile and make our excuses and try and sell them an album even though CD players are disappearing like the ice caps. Because an album gave us 10 whole pounds and we knew that we'd need 3000 streams to replicate that online.
But it was a losing battle and one that we have inevitably lost. There are many perks to Spotify and the main one being that you lovely people can listen to us whenever and wherever you want, not just in the car!
And to borrow a famous quote by one of our own, "when you give, you get back" and I know you guys will continue to support us when we finally release our third album (next year I promise!). Plus I know the physical copy means so much more, even if it is a struggle to play it.
And so next week we will finally upload our music onto Spotify, a company that claims it's made a loss every single year; must be due to our boycott hey! Poor old Spotify, it's only worth 54 billion.
Anyway one of the longest running sagas is about to end, and The Odd Folk will finally join the mainstream. We've sat on this fence too long. It's been like resisting the vaccination.
And has it harmed us, probably, another benefit to Spotify is it circulates your music to a far wider audience.
Oh well, just another notch in the bedpost of How NOT to be in a Band!
