But doing so also required, for very annoying reasons, removing it from all other streaming platforms as well, because the distributor I was working with, TooLost, had no option for removing music from just one platform without deleting and re-uploading everything2.
So, when is my music going to get back onto the other streaming platforms? Ehhh.
The state of affairs for independent music distribution is a horror show. Every distributor I’ve used has been a nightmare to work with in some way, and has ended up costing me far more in my dealings with them than I’ve ever made back. I’ve made probably around $1003 in total over the past 20 years from streaming. It has cost me a lot more than $100 to make my music available on streaming4.
Meanwhile, the “best” month I’ve ever had on streaming was the month after Furality Somna, where I got a brief surge of interest on Spotify, but not enough of one to actually get any of the sustainable characteristics that one would expect. The people who listened to my stuff didn’t keep listening to it, my work never ended up in any recommendation feeds or popular playlists, and even with the amount of direct interest I got, I only ended up making around $7, which isn’t even enough to receive a payment from my distributor. And it only pays for about two months of distribution fees anyway.
I’ve also written extensively about the problems with streaming platforms and Spotify in particular, and that’s not an industry I really want to support right now. In addition to Spotify’s issues, I’ve also learned of reasons to distrust Apple Music and Tidal, for example their partnerships with Rekordbox which makes it so that DJs can stream artists' music into their mixes without materially supporting said artists beyond “exposure.”
I’ve also had great difficulty with getting my music onto streaming platforms to begin with these days. In addition to costing considerably more to get distribution than I can ever expect to receive in return, every distributor has succumbed to the problems with a glut of AI submissions, where they have lost all trust in musicians who haven’t already made it big, and provide Kafka-esque hoops to jump through to prove that my music was made by me. This isn’t entirely the fault of the distributors, but it is a symptom of a deeply broken industry.
I have also applied to many record labels but they only want to sign up-and-coming musicians, not ones with a deep catalog of what they see as unsuccessful releases, or they want people with a much larger social media presence and a fanbase which would be large enough for me to not need a label to begin with. I am not a social media darling (nor do I want to be), and I just plain don’t have it in me to try to get what they want of me.
So I’m focusing on what I have control over.
At the moment, my plan is to do the following:
If someone can point me to a fair, ethically-managed distributor that supports independent musicians (rather than using the promise of winning the lottery to keep us constantly buying tickets), I would certainly consider reuploading my catalog somewhere.
What do I think counts as ethical in this case?
None of these feel very likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But also, the entire streaming music industry needs to change for me to want to really participate in it, and I don’t see that happening either. Too much about how the industry works is based around the demands of the major labels in order to keep the major-label content available, even though their requirements ultimately end up working against their interests as well!
Alternately, if any of the streaming platforms were to allow artists to directly upload and self-distribute to them while still earning royalties5, that would be peachy.
I know many musicians for whom this path would not make any sense. Last night at an open mic I was talking about this with a friend, and he was very surprised to hear about my experiences with streaming vs. sales; he makes substantial amounts of money from streaming, and very little from Bandcamp (and what he pays to get his stuff on Bandcamp hasn’t paid for his Bandcamp earnings).
A big part of that is that he primarily records and releases covers of popular music. As a result, he ends up getting his audience from people looking for popular songs, and this led to a level of sustainability that works in his favor. This is also why Bandcamp has been a money pit for him, because mechanical licenses for purchase are significantly more expensive than those for streaming.
But by the same token, what works for other musicians has not worked for me. Why should I keep playing the game when I have 20+ years of experience telling me that it just plain isn’t worthwhile for me to do so?
Anyway. I do not need streaming in order to feel successful. So for now I’m opting out.
Maybe in the future this will change. But dealing with the stresses and frustration of streaming is the least important thing to me right now with everything else going on in my life.
Yes, I realize Daniel Ek “stepped down” as CEO, but only by becoming the chairman of the board. He is now essentially the CEO’s boss, and still the majority shareholder, so this doesn’t actually change anything vis-a-vis my issues with Spotify. ↩
I also had to pay $3 to do it because TooLost was holding my catalog hostage, but that’s just pocket change in the grand scheme of things. ↩
Or rather, I’ve had numbers in a database totalling around that amount, but I can’t even withdraw a bunch of it because it’s all in little pieces that are below their respective distributors' payout thresholds, where they will sit forever. ↩
It’s hard to put an actual number on it, but I do know I’ve spent at least this much: ↩
Tidal Upload, sadly, does not count: ↩
Does the music that I upload earn royalties on TIDAL?
No, your uploaded files do not earn royalties.
Here’s how I have mine set up and how I run it for (basically1) free.
First off, I have an Intel NUC running Linux2 on my home network. This computer runs a bunch of my home services but mostly sits idle. Its CPU is a 2.7GHz i7-8559U, which is sufficient to transcode my stream to a number of bitrates and resolutions simultaneously. I currently have the following bitrates configured:
In theory I should also be able to configure it to use Intel Quick Sync for a bit lower CPU utilization, although I haven’t gone through the rigmarole to make that happen, as it hasn’t been necessary.
Anyway, Owncast is running on its own user account, creatively called owncast. To make the server automatically start up, I have the following systemd unit file:
[Unit] Description=Owncast Service [Service] WorkingDirectory=/home/owncast/owncast ExecStart=/home/owncast/owncast/owncast Restart=always RestartSec=5 [Install] WantedBy=default.target
To make this run, I had to enable lingering for the account, with sudo loginctl enable-linger owncast from an administrative user, and systemctl --user enable owncast.service from the owncast account.
The next thing to do was to expose this server to the greater Internet. There’s a few ways you can go about doing this. The most straightforward, if you have an ISP that allows it, is to set up your home router to forward a particular port to the Owncast instance. However, many ISPs do not allow you to run servers this way, and even though mine does, I wasn’t super comfortable with the idea of exposing a network port to the wider Internet or with having my home IP address be part of any public Internet service.
However, I already have a VPS with Akamai Cloud which I use to run all of my websites. So, I set up an ssh tunnel (specifically using autossh to automatically restart the connection if it drops). To that end, I made a second systemd unit:
[Unit] Description=Owncast ssh tunnel [Service] ExecStart=autossh -NT -R 29929:localhost:8080 MYSERVER.example.com Restart=always RestartSec=5 [Install] WantedBy=default.target
where MYSERVER.example.com is the actual hostname of my VPS. I enabled this service with systemctl --user enable owncast-tunnel.service and now localhost connections to 29929 on my VPS connect to port 8080 on my NUC. (No need for Tailscale!)
Finally, I set up a caching reverse proxy for my owncast server. This is how I did it in nginx:
server { listen 80; listen [::]:80; server_name live.sockpuppet.band; return 301 https://$host$request_uri; } proxy_cache_path /var/tmp/live_sockpuppet levels=1:2 keys_zone=live_sockpuppet:10m max_size=10g inactive=60m use_temp_path=off; server { server_name live.sockpuppet.band; listen 443 ssl; ssl_certificate /path/to/sockpuppet.band.crt; ssl_certificate_key /path/to/sockpuppet.band.key; location / { proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Server $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade; proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:29929; proxy_cache live_sockpuppet; } }
This caching configuration means that this edge server only needs to proxy each HLS segment from my home network once, so in theory I can get a full gigabit of upstream from my VPS without overly burdening my home connection (although my home connection has plenty of bandwidth to spare, all the same).
This is optional, but I also use Cloudflare CDN for DDOS and bot mitigation, as well as better caching performance worldwide. So far I’ve never come even remotely close to exceeding the bandwidth capacity of my VPS (which should theoretically be able to serve around 200 simultaneous viewers), but Cloudflare’s free tier means I don’t have to worry about scaling at all.
I’m not a huge fan of Cloudflare for a number of reasons, but it’s made it a lot easier for me to deal with the constant deluge of AI bot traffic that’s been causing me so much stress lately, and having a proper geographically-distributed CDN is a nice bonus.
In theory, if your ISP allows running servers, you could also configure Cloudflare to talk directly to your home router, although I believe doing arbitrary port forwards requires a paid plan.
To send a stream out, instead of using the public-facing hostname (live.sockpuppet.band), I connect OBS to the local IP address, so that I don’t have to go out to the public Internet just to be routed back home. This way I also don’t have to expose Owncast’s RTMP port to the public Internet, which gives me better security. On the minus side, this means I cannot easily share my server with others to allow others to stream with my infrastructure, but that’s never come up. If I ever wanted to do a cooperative stream with someone, I could use a WebRTC proxy such as VDO.ninja, but setting that up is outside the scope of this blog post.
Anyway, when someone connects to my owncast they are viewing it through Cloudflare, which pulls the data from my VPS, which in turn proxies it over the SSH tunnel to the Owncast instance running on my device at home. The raw stream (used, for example, by a VRChat in-world player) is available at https://live.sockpuppet.band/hls/stream.m3u8.
Okay so let’s say you just want to roll your own VRCDN-like thing, and don’t care about having your streaming box be directly on your local network. Here’s what I’d do for that:
For streaming you’ll need to connect directly to the server by IP address (or by having a hostname that’s not Cloudflare-proxied), but otherwise you’re good to go from here.
In such a setup you’ll probably need to limit the bitrates that you provide.
Anyway, a suitably-capable VPS will cost around 5.4¢/hour while it’s running, and theoretically be able to support hundreds, if not thousands, of simultaneous viewers.
It’s only basically free because I already have a public Internet server I run my websites on and a local computer I can use for Owncast. If you don’t already have a VPS of some sort, my particular setup won’t work for you. ↩
All of this could also be run on Windows or macOS, but setting up a persistent server and ssh tunnel on those platforms is not something I’ve had to internalize. ↩
TooLost (my previous top recommendation) has gotten incredibly difficult to deal with when it comes to copyright-related things. They now have a hair trigger for deciding that a song “needs documentation” regarding its legality, but won’t provide any useful information about what they think the problem is. On my most recent track they seem to think that it violates someone’s copyright but they won’t tell me whose, and apparently they’re putting the burden on me to just plain guess what their issue is, while taking a week to get back to me on every single question.
The best advice I’ve gotten from anyone is to spend a crapton more money on a copyright registration service with the hopes that it’ll convince them that I own the copyright to my own words, and even then there’s still the chance that it won’t actually help anything.
Then, for individual tracks that required licensing, I was recommending Soundrop, but they’ve raised their price and their cut, and apparently have similar support issues today.
The other distributors are just as bad. And the streaming environment is also bad.
In the past year I’ve made approximately $5 on streaming services. $5. Total. For a whole year’s worth of music.
Why should I continue to pay into a broken system that isn’t going to serve me?
Y'all can find my music on Bandcamp and Mirlo and (eventually) Subvert. And my current stuff will stay up on streaming as long as TooLost decides not to take it down after I stop paying, but I’m not going to go out of my way to put more stuff up through them.
Fuck streaming.
#Business #Streaming #Distribution #TooLost ]]>I wrote this as an explanation of why I don’t support Spotify and why I ask listeners to return to buying and collecting music or, at the very least, moving to other streaming services.
Also, see Jeremy Blake’s very good video on this topic.
tl;dr summary: If you are able to, buy your music, ideally from Mirlo or Bandcamp. If you are going to pay to stream, use Qobuz or Tidal, and if you want to stream for free (and I totally get it! times are tough!), use YouTube Music or Pandora.
Here is my personal ranking of the best ways to get and/or listen to music, ordered from best to worst.
All per-stream prices are an estimate and based on my most recent available earnings data at the time of this writing, and based on the US market. They are definitely subject to change based on a number of factors that are difficult to predict.
If the band has their own website1, they’ll probably display their preference for how you get their music. Above all else, that should be your top consideration.
Note that listening to a band’s music on their own website typically does not give them any revenue; listening on a band’s website is generally offered as a means of doing a “try before you buy.” If you like what you hear on a band’s website, please follow the respective purchase or streaming links for your actual collecting/listening.
Mirlo is an independent online music store run as a cooperative. The audio quality is great and musicians are in complete control of how much money they make on it, including choosing how much of the purchase price goes to Mirlo itself. The people running it are doing so for the love of music rather than to make fat stacks of cash, and my understanding is that the site pretty much just breaks even on its operating costs.
It is also open source meaning people can contribute changes or directly influence the development efforts, and you can run your own instance of it if you really want to for some reason.
With Mirlo you will have to own your collection, which is a good thing. More on that later.
itch isn’t really a music store, but a lot of people sell music there. The experience usually isn’t great and is up to the musician (although things like bandcrash can help to make it better). Like Mirlo, it’s totally up to the musician how much money they get and how much goes to the platform.
With itch you will also have to own your collection.
Bandcamp is probably the most popular indie music download site there is, and with good reason. They offer high-quality downloads in a number of formats, they were the first site to offer a lot of features which many places take for granted these days (pay-what-you-want pricing, embedded lyrics, optional per-track artwork, full discography purchases, and so much more), and if you buy something on Bandcamp you can also stream it through the app so you don’t need to manage your own local library. They also only take a 15% cut for small musicians, and a 10% cut for larger musicians.
They’ve somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years due to a series of changes in ownership, but it is still a great place to buy music which supports the artists.
While it isn’t strictly required that you own your collection (thanks to the streaming app), it’s still a good idea that you do so, especially if you listen to music that comes from a mix of sources.
Qobuz is both a streaming provider and a download store. Their claim to fame is that they provide everything in the highest possible bitrate and quality, and they are also quite good in terms of how they support artists.
They’re not the best option for purchasing (since Mirlo and Bandcamp match them in terms of quality and exceed them in terms of payment cut), but they are the most-desirable option for streaming (since they provide the highest per-stream rate in the industry, at 1.5¢/stream at the time of this writing).
If there’s an album you want to buy and which isn’t on Mirlo or Bandcamp, Qobuz is probably the best place to acquire it.
Unfortunately, they aren’t available globally, buf if you’re in one of the supported countries they’re a good choice.
Tidal has good quality, a reasonable monthly price, and one of the better per-stream rates (1¢/stream) of the larger/better-known providers. They’re also one of the few major DSPs which allows musicians to directly upload their music for streaming and sales, although some of their artist management could be better. That shouldn’t affect listeners, although sometimes my music ends up on the wrong artist profile and getting that corrected can be tricky.
For example, as of April 2026, my official artist profile only has one release on it, while most of my music has ended up on a different profile, and Tidal support is taking their sweet time getting that fixed. (They claim it will take at least 8 weeks to get sorted out.)
I’ve also heard anecdotally from other musicians that the opposite problem often happens, where other musicians with the same name release music, Tidal erroneously puts it on their profile, and getting that corrected also takes, apparently, forever.
The Amazon Music store and Amazon Prime Streaming are pretty okay, all things considered. As a download store they take a 30% cut, but they provide music in reasonably-high-quality (but not the best quality) MP3. The streaming service pays around 1¢/stream.
The main downside is that using them means supporting Amazon, which a lot of folks do not want to do for very good reasons.
The iTunes Music Store is one of the earliest major download services (and they set the standard for how those work), and even today it’s still a reasonable option. It’s far from the best, though, mostly because they only offer AAC downloads at a high-but-not-amazing bitrate, and being Apple they heavily encourage its use on Apple devices (although there are Windows and Android clients as well, and with effort you can make your purchases on Linux too).
For downloads they keep a 30% cut, which isn’t the worst in the industry but is also far from the best. For streams, their payment rate is just okay, currently around 0.8¢/stream.
YouTube Music has a bunch going for it:
The main downsides are that the subscription is on the expensive side, and that you’re supporting Google, which a lot of people don’t like.
They currently pay around 0.6¢/stream for subscription plays. (They also pay based on ad revenue for content match videos but that’s not relevant to this discussion, or to my music, as being Creative Commons-licensed it’s not eligible for ContentID, but that’s a whole other rant.)
Providers like Deezer, Rdio, Napster, etc. all seem to offer rates of around 0.8¢/stream.
There are two notable exceptions:
I would honestly prefer people pirate my music before they listen to it on Spotify. This is because:
If you listen to music on Spotify, even on a free plan, they get money. And where does that money go?
You see what’s missing from that list? The actual musicians.
Back when Spotify paid musicians, the rate was about 0.5¢/stream. This is among the worst in the industry.
HOWEVER
At this point they rarely even pay musicians, especially the smaller ones:
So, for a smaller independent musician like me, Spotify pays essentially $0.
You may then ask, why do so many musicians put their stuff on Spotify if it’s so bad? It’s mostly because it’s the platform everyone uses, and the hope is that if one gets discovered on Spotify they’ll actually make a decent amount of money. But even the artists who do are getting largely screwed over, and not making nearly as much as if those streams had come from a different streaming provider.
But enough musicians have decided to remove their music from Spotify that I hope that listeners will decide to go to other, more ethical sources for their music.
Every time I perform at a show I get people asking me not “where can I hear your music?” but “Where’s your Spotify?” Or if they do ask where they can hear it and I point them to my website, they ask about Spotify, because that’s the only place they can conceive of listening to it. Sometimes these questions even come right after I’ve performed The War Machine, a song which is explicitly about why my music isn’t on Spotify. It will take some time to get people on board with seeking alternatives.
My goal in this post isn’t to encourage musicians to leave Spotify. My goal is to get listeners to do so. It’s the listeners who make Spotify money, and that money goes to terrible places.
There are better listening experiences that cost you less while doing a much better job of directly supporting musicians.
Owning your collection means buying and downloading your music, and managing it in your own local collection. This has so many advantages:
I manage my collection by keeping it all on my desktop computer and then use Music.app/iTunes to track it in its database. Then I have a smart playlist setup that will randomly select albums I haven’t listened to recently, and use that for actually listening to my music and for building playlists to sync to my phone.
I also have a backup (always keep it backed up!) on a file server which is also running Plex and Jellyfin, which gives me the ability to stream my collection from just about anywhere. Plex in particular provides an “Album Radio” mode which will build a playlist from randomly-selected albums, and the paid version gives you some nice virtual DJ things for automatically building mixes from a particular song (great for crate digging!).
People often ask me about how I discover new music.
First of all, my playback setup is integrated with last.fm, so that maintains a history of the music I’ve played, and can also make recommendations for more music to listen to. Plex has last.fm support built in directly, and both macOS and iOS have tracking apps to feed the play history in.
The other major thing is that I follow a lot of musicians and music fans, both via blogs and via social media (the Fediverse in particular). Ether Diver has a blog called Other People’s Music which has been particularly helpful. (And of course sometimes I try to remember to post similar things here to pay it forward, and this is also why I keep my last.fm profile public.)
Sometimes I also listen to the radio. A good radio station will expose you to so much good music that you hadn’t heard before. Also be on the lookout for various community Internet radio stations like KVRR and The Indie Beat. But most of how I discover new music is by word-of-mouth, and then buying entire discographies of bands I like.
Here’s some non-iTunes music players and self-hosted streaming systems that you might consider for managing your collection:
If a band does not have their own website, they could do well to build one using any number of website builders. Faircamp is pretty decent for a lot of folks. Personally I use a combination of Publ and Bandcrash but that can be pretty involved to set up. ↩
When I first wrote this article Ek was still the CEO. He has since “stepped down” to become the chairman of the board, which makes no actual practical difference because now he’s the CEO’s boss and still the majority shareholder. ↩
No llamas had their asses whipped in the making of this blog post. ↩