HELLO! It's that time of year again where everyone shares their top @SpotifyUK tracks, and so I'm just here to speak to you as an independent unsigned artist. 1/By all means use Spotify! That's totally fine! Music is made to be listened to and there is no wrong way to listen.

2/When I got to 100,000 streams of my song, I ultimately received £82.50.
That's it.
On average, I am lucky to get about £100 every quarter for quite literally hundreds of thousands of streams of my songs in that period.

Am I bitter about this? Not really. I do not release music to make money. If I was trying to live off it, I would be dead. However, I just want to remind you that if you ARE streaming music by non globally famous people with enormous publishing deals & record deals & sync deals

then for the Love of God buy their physical merchandise. Pay for their streamed gigs. Donate to their patreons. Very few of us are out here expecting to make a living off this, but it costs money to upkeep instruments and kit and to record music. It costs quite a lot of money.

That money is not going to come in from Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon music unless you are Dua Lipa (NB: I love Dua Lipa). So if you like the music, and you can afford to, support the artist directly (Added bonus of breaking the corporate capitalist circuit too! Win win).