How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month

In college about 5 years ago, I heard a presentation from some recording industry people who worked at a studio. They saw Spotify as the reason their industry would still exist in five years. I think at the time total recording revenues were still declining, but the streaming growth was really picking up.<p>Spotify has brilliantly convinced many people to spend $120 per year on music. The average CD-buyer spent much less than that. It&#x27;s become normal and acceptable to have a subscription to this stuff. It was hard to imagine in the early 2000s when so many pirated their music for free.

I bet you&#x27;ll get some new interest from this being on the front page of HN too. I just listened to a bunch of your songs and really liked them :)<p>I love Discover Weekly and get excited every Monday morning when I start work and remember there&#x27;s a new playlist with music I&#x27;ll probably like. I created a separate playlist called &quot;Discover Favourites&quot; and when I hear a song I like I put it in there, and it&#x27;s got hundreds now. I&#x27;ve found so many artists I never would have heard of.

This is a great counterpoint to people complaining about how little they make from Spotify.<p>One thing that stuck out to me:<p>&gt; Because you can only submit one song, it’s best to space out releases. That way you can have ten singles considered by Spotify editors— rather than one single from an album for an entire year.<p>I&#x27;ve wondered why so many artists were releasing a ton of singles on Spotify. This seems like a gameable system.

I used to love the Discover Weekly, but now that I use Spotify most days when going to the gym any of my auto generated playlists like discover weekly kinda suck. I usually put on random gym playlists like the popular &quot;Beast Mode&quot; one. While I like this music for working out, I definitely don&#x27;t normally enjoy listening to rap, hip hop, and EDM music however this is what most workout music consists of.<p>I wish I could have playlists that get ignored from Spotify&#x27;s recommendation engine. Because I totally get it, Spotify thinks I&#x27;m into that kind of stuff so it&#x27;s what I use Spotify for the majority of the time, however I have such a hard time finding new music to listen to on there :(.

Apple should have bought Spotify. They could&#x27;ve renamed it &quot;Apple Music&quot; if they wanted but they should have otherwise left it alone. They could&#x27;ve even gotten rid of the ad-supported stuff and made it subscription only, I personally wouldn&#x27;t have cared.<p>But my point is that Spotify is everything Apple Music should be. I&#x27;m an avowed Apple fan owning and using many of their products and services for decades so when I say Apple Music is terrible it&#x27;s not coming from a place of otherwise disdain that some have for Apple. Frankly, the whole iTunes and Apple Music teams should be embarrassed with what they continue to release. And if the Podcasts app isn&#x27;t part of those teams it should be, because it is every bit as bad.<p>I hate to be negative but a spade needs to be called a spade in this case. Apple needs to be called out on those shoddy products.

This is pretty awesome to read, and the charts are really telling.<p>&gt; For an indie artist like me, the major difference between Apple Music and Spotify is Discover Weekly. Apple Music has no equivalent.<p>This is just not true, Apple Music sends you 3 different personalized weekly playlists, two of which from Music you do not already have in your library. I have discovered tons of indie artists (many with &lt; 100 followers on Twitter) through these playlists.

It&#x27;s gatifying as a spotify user to think maybe someday soon there could be a population of artists that make a reasonable living uploading their own music and sustaining their efforts without the need for merch, marketing, or touring -- instead just quietly subsisting on doing something they love doing.

I&#x27;m glad Spotify has opened up as a new revenue stream for musicians but it&#x27;s a laughably small amount of revenue for how much work it is to compose&#x2F;record hours of original music. Live music is still king for making money.<p>As an amateur pianist myself, $400 isn&#x27;t a lot of money per month. I can pull $100&#x2F;hr in an afternoon at a classy gig playing Classical&#x2F;Jazz&#x2F;Folk&#x2F;Pop, you do that once per week and you&#x27;re well over the $400 total for the month, without all the long history of recording&#x2F;mixing&#x2F;mastering&#x2F;promoting that OP has done. This has allowed me to focus much more heavily on my musicianship and expanding my repertoire, rather than on recording tech&#x2F;marketing. My ceiling for income is much lower this way-- I can&#x27;t&#x2F;don&#x27;t want to find enough gigs to solely perform...but that&#x27;s why I code to pay the bills.

I make about $200&#x2F;month thanks to Spotify listing my podcast. Their partnership with Anchor.fm has really helped push my pod forward because the new features on anchor, since the acquisition, have helped me pinpoint an audience.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;open.spotify.com&#x2F;show&#x2F;0jW7nOHQNi1Xlr3v7UMi2p</a>

As an artist I totally loved this! Especially you talking about just wanting to make songs when you get home in the evening, not hustle on every single front. $400 a month is admirable for music creation!

This is a great example of the opportunity created by ‘the long tail’ of web platforms. I’m glad that people can make money making music and that listeners have so much more choice. Very insightful.

They bring up something interesting which is how streaming has changed how music is made. Albums are now shorter with more songs, that nets more plays and more money. They also focus on singles instead of full albums, which gives more opportunity for &quot;playlisting&quot;. It&#x27;s an interesting, albeit concerning, effect that technology is having on art.

I look forward to every Monday to check out my Discover Weekly. Cool to hear it&#x27;s having a positive impact on artists.

The insight to upload a single every 4 weeks is quite valuable. My songs are all done with pocket operators&#x2F;an op-1&#x2F;tone.js, theres a small soundcloud community that follows this type of dawless production but possible longer form ambient tracks would do well on spotify.

It would be interesting to see the bump you get in listeners post HN front page.

For the machine learning enthusiasts, here is an old article on how Spotify classifies songs into genres based on what they actually sound like (input is a spectrogram) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;C3PVuU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;C3PVuU</a>.<p>Most conventional methods used to recommend based on what other artists people with the same taste as you like. This method is biased against newer artists as there is no easy way to bootstrap them into the process. Their new technique circumvents this problem and as a result new artists get more exposure.

I also use Discover Weekly (DW) as a listener fairly consistently and have had some success with it. I believe Spotify mentioned in their S-1 how transformative DW has been to music discovery at large. Side note: Spotify keeps making small UI changes that don’t really seem to improve my UI usage. The changes don’t even make it worse. They just keep moving everything slightly. I’ve run into this a few times while trying to find DW.

This is great but I worry that it&#x27;s like when Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn&#x27;t. Everyone loves free money but it sounds like it could dry up at any time at Spotify&#x27;s whim and there&#x27;d be no recourse and no explanation.<p>It is really great that Spotify is putting small to tiny artists into their mass-market playlists. Enjoy it while it lasts.

A killer feature for spotify would be if they would tell each individual user how much they are contributing to each individual artist they&#x27;ve listened to. I think that could encourage users to subscribe to spotify and listen more to small artists. I suppose this too could be gamed, but the benefit might outweigh the risk.

I would love to see an analysis of the artists I listen to on spotify. Last.fm tracks all the songs I listen to so someone would just need to scrape that, find info on each song&#x2F;artist, and make some nice charts. I&#x27;d love to see which artists I listen to that are very small&#x2F;unknown and send them a thank you.

This is interesting anecdotally but for those trying to make a living from their music, I would argue direct subscriptions seem far more stable and useful as part of your income. For example bandcamp or something like patreon, where I can subscribe to some artist I really like for $1-3&#x2F;month or something and get access to everything they do. That&#x27;s the closest model I&#x27;ve seen for non-huge-industry folks making a living from recordings -- which is of course usually supplemented by touring and a dozen other hustles. (for example mastering or teaching)<p>IMHO overall it doesn&#x27;t feel like the situation has changed all that much in this era though. The same huge institutions remain magnets for a handful of lottery-winners (big labels, funded orchestras, etc) and everyone else is scraping by in myriad ways, though the ways are a bit different now.

Thanks for sharing with actual numbers! I&#x27;ll check out your music too.<p>Discover Weekly is how I find a lot of new music similar to my music, I <i>trust</i> it more than most of the other playlists Spotify or Apple Music create. So far, I&#x27;ve probably discovered 300-400 new songs using Discover Weekly.

Very cool writeup. I&#x27;m a big fan of Discover Weekly as it turns me onto new artists constantly.

I find so much good music on Discover Weekly. It’s one of the big reasons I stick with Spotify. I’ve tried all of the other services but none of them come close. And I am fully in the Apple ecosystem but Apples recommendations are not even close to Spotify.

Next figure out how to work the YouTube and YTM recommendation algorithm. I know I&#x27;m not the only one paying for premium and actively discovering small independent artists everyday through recommendations.

The main problem I have with discovery weekly now is that I primarily use Spotify for the gym but during the day I like to listen to a work playlist that mostly consists of non-vocal electronica.<p>So because I spend so much time listening to the work playlist it&#x27;s began to influence the music on my Discover Weekly which I used to use to curate new hip-hop&#x2F;metal music for the gym. It would be nice if Spotify gave you finer control over the type of music that hits your Discover Weekly because it really would suggest good music for me occasionally.

Everyone here is marveling at the thought that Spotify could launch someone&#x27;s career. But there is already a service that does this consistently and it&#x27;s called SoundCloud.

Are you also on Tidal? I was looking for your music but I couldn&#x27;t find it. I actually prefer their service and I hear they pay 4x the artists compared to Spotify.

From my understanding, Spotify&#x27;s recommendations have a major flaw - they&#x27;re based off other users&#x27; listening data. What this means is that if a song isn&#x27;t listened to by very many people it&#x27;ll never be recommended, and many songs on Spotify don&#x27;t even have a single stream, let alone however many it takes to get the data to make it a recommendation.

Wow, this is pretty informative. Thanks for sharing.

Anybody have stats on $ per stream? How does that number vary between premium&#x2F;non-premium and on the region you’re streaming from?

I wonder if the $10&#x2F;mo price of Spotify has anchored listeners to a low price that Spotify can&#x27;t get out of. Spotify will need to pull more money in to be able to give musicians more money per stream. Even if they were able to increase revenues, musicians will need to be able to claim a bigger part of that pie.

Nice write up, I listen to my DW playlist quite a lot.<p>I wonder if this approach is fraught with risk though, in the sense that if Spotify tweak the algorithm and suddenly his listener numbers drop. I guess in his case the snowball effect is already in motion, but a tweak could curtail that growth.

Congratulations on your achievement ! Do you have your content on Bandcamp ?<p>As people share on this thread, convenience is winning the game but there&#x27;s a rising market for other people that value supporting the artists directly.<p>Keep it up and great work!

I&#x27;m interested how you record your music. I see on your website that you have a producer. Do you record in a home studio? Pro Logic?

12% conversion rate is very good. I suggest using more sale channels and spend some money on advertising.

If Spotify is becoming for musicians what GitHub became for programmers, I say that’s pretty damn cool.