I was talking to a friend last week who just quit his day job to go full-time as a producer. After congratulating him, I asked the obvious question: “How are you going to eat?” He laughed, shrugged, and said, “I have no idea, but I can’t not do it.” That sentence has been echoing in my head ever since.

Let’s be brutally honest: the economics of being a musician in 2025 are grim for almost everyone. Unless your name is in the top 0.01% of Spotify’s monthly listeners or you’re sitting on a catalog that still earns healthy mechanicals, the math is soul-crushing.

A billion streams might get you a nice house. A million streams will barely cover rent in a mid-sized city for a year. The middle class of music has evaporated. Sync deals, brand partnerships, and TikTok virality have become the new lottery tickets, and we all know how lotteries work.

So why—why—do thousands of us still wake up, open the laptop, finish the vocal take, argue over the snare sound, and hit “distribute” the moment the master comes back?

Because we have to.

Not for fame. Fame is a side effect that happens to a vanishingly small number of people, and most of them will tell you (off the record) that it’s a fairly unpleasant way to live. And definitely not for fortune. If your primary motivation is money, there are far more reliable ways to get it: learn to code, trade crypto, become a plumber, sell feet pics—literally anything is statistically wiser than betting on music income.

We release music because the alternative is worse.

There’s a moment that every real artist knows. You finish something—a song, an EP, sometimes just a 30-second idea—and for a brief, flickering second the thing exists exactly the way you heard it in your head. That moment is addictive. It’s better than any drug, any applause, any royalty deposit. It’s the feeling of being completely alive and completely yourself at the same time. The second you let it out into the world, you lose control of it forever. Someone will hate it. Someone will misinterpret the lyrics. Someone will use it as background noise while they fold laundry. And that’s fine. That’s the deal. But you still have to let it go, because keeping it trapped inside you is slow death.

Legacy is part of it, sure. Deep down we all imagine someone, somewhere, a hundred years from now, stumbling across our Bandcamp page or an old hard drive and thinking, “Damn, they were feeling something.” But legacy is a comforting lie we tell ourselves so we don’t have to admit the scarier truth: we do this because creating is how we process being alive. Joy, grief, lust, rage, boredom, wonder—music is the cheapest therapy real, and releasing it is how we finish the session.

I released an album last year that maybe 400 people heard. I didn’t even recoup the costs. By every objective metric it was a failure. Yet I still catch myself grinning like an idiot when a stranger messages me saying track 7 got them through a breakup, or when I overhear it playing faintly from someone’s car at a stoplight. Those moments are worth more than any realistic amount of money I could have made instead.

The industry wants us to believe music is content, that success is measured in streams and followers, that if you’re not trending you’re irrelevant. That narrative is great for platforms and labels—it keeps us desperate and productive—but it’s poison for actual artists. The second you internalize it, you start making fear-based decisions: chasing trends, sanding off edges, writing captions instead of songs.

The musicians who last are the ones who remember why they started: because a sound got stuck in their chest and the only way to get it out was to finish it, release it, and start the next one. Everything else—attention, money, validation—is weather. It comes and goes. The need to create is climate.

So no, this isn’t a post to tell you “follow your dreams and the money will come.” The money probably won’t. This is permission to stop measuring your work against impossible standards and to start measuring it against the only standard that ever mattered: does making it and releasing it still feel like breathing?

If the answer is yes, then keep going. The world doesn’t owe us a living for our art. But we owe ourselves the right to make it anyway.

We release music because we need to. Everything else is noise.