Fifty thousand plays. That’s what it takes before one song pays for itself. Here’s the arithmetic, and why I’d rather you bought the record.
Getting a song mixed and mastered properly costs somewhere around $150. That’s not the recording — that’s just the last stretch, where a track stops sounding like a demo and starts sounding like a record.
Spotify pays out roughly $0.003 per stream. Divide one by the other and you get 50,000.
Fifty thousand plays so that one song breaks even on its final polish. Not profits. Not the guitar strings, the interface, the time. Just the mixing bill.
What 50,000 actually looks like
It’s hard to picture a number that size, so here it is in time. Fifty thousand plays of a four-minute track is 200,000 minutes. That’s over 3,300 hours. One person listening around the clock, no sleep, no pause, for 138 days.
For a ten-song album, the figure climbs to half a million streams — before I’ve paid for recording, artwork, or the room I made it in.
I’m not saying this to complain about Spotify. Streaming is how most people find music now, including how most people find mine, and I’d rather be heard than not. But it’s worth being clear-eyed about what it is: a discovery service that happens to pay a little, not an income.
The other side of the sum
Here’s what makes a purchase feel different from this end.
If you buy the album on Bandcamp for $3.99, I keep somewhere around $3.40 after their cut. To reach that same $3.40 through streaming, at three-tenths of a cent a play, would take roughly 1,133 streams.
One purchase. Eleven hundred plays. Same money.
Put another way: if you buy the album once, you’ve done more for the next release than you could by playing it on repeat for a fortnight.
An honest caveat
That $0.003 figure isn’t a fixed rate, and anyone who tells you otherwise is simplifying. Spotify doesn’t pay per stream at all — it pools subscription revenue and divides it by total plays across the platform, so the number moves month to month and shifts depending on which country you’re listening from and whether you’re on a paid account.
Some months it’s better than $0.003. Some months worse. The point isn’t the decimal place. The point is that the gap between a stream and a purchase is roughly three orders of magnitude, and no amount of rounding closes it.
Why I’m telling you this
Not as a guilt trip. Stream the music. Put it on in the car, add it to a playlist, leave it running while you work — that’s what it’s for, and I’d rather have the play than the silence.
But if you’ve listened to something here more than once, and you’ve wondered whether it makes any difference which button you press: it does. Buying on Bandcamp isn’t charity. It’s the only route I’ve found that makes the next record possible without going broke on the last one. Same with Subvert, for what it’s worth — anywhere the money arrives without passing through six sets of hands first.
No label, no budget, no paid promotion. Just one bloke in Manchester who’d like to keep going.