No, sharing your Spotify year-end artist stats is not a good idea – here’s why not
No. I do not have a Spotify artist account. Nevertheless, if I had, I am not sure I would agree with the sentiment that streaming services screw artists. On the one hand, yes, it seems extremely difficult to make any (meaningful) money by (only) streaming your music. On the other, no one is forced to stream their music and with its rich history of subcultures, bootlegs, fanzines, t-shirt sales, club gigs, etc it seems, to me, the music world provides an as good opportunity as ever for aspiring musicians to get their music out there, and maybe even earn a buck or two. Also, people don’t play football expecting to be professionals, so why should music publishing be any different? Most people tend to get paid for doing things they don’t like. That’s why it’s called work. Thus, it seems reasonable that playing at a wedding should be work and something you only do if you get paid for it. Writing music, however, seems more like writing books: Lots of people do it out of love for the art, very few expect to earn money from it but a few lucky do.
