. . . I spent most of the morning submitting the new Project MA single to the streaming distribution service of Distrokid. It’s a popular way to get music out there and relatively inexpensive–I think for something like $25 a year you can upload as much music as you want and that music is then distributed to all the major streaming services. So my songwriting partner, Adam, and I use this service for our single releases. It’s pretty easy to do, but time consuming. But here’s my theory about why Distrokid is so inexpensive: in almost every step of the way in the uploading process, there’s an opportunity to spend more money for additional services, services that might be automatically included by a distribution service like CDBaby. At any rate, mostly for musicians who might be reading this, I’m not sure I’d recommend Distrokid. There are lots of cool features there, but if you need a full treatment from your distribution service, you’ll end up spending more money.
The music industry has become so strange. I mean, it’s always been strange, but now, with the advent of the streaming service explosion, it has become exceedingly weird and deceptive and destructive. On the one hand, music streaming appears to have democratized music production and promotion. Anyone with a home studio (economically within reach now for any musician with a few hundred bucks), can share their music with the entire universe. There’s no label executive or radio gatekeepers. So music listeners have at their fingertips access to billions of choices that would NEVER have had a chance of being heard even ten years ago. But this abundance might also be a gigantic hurdle for independent musicians, who are likely to be lost in the sheer volume of new uploads. Spotify claims that 60,000 new songs are uploaded to its platform EVERY DAY. So what are the chances that a musician will actually be heard by listeners outside of their immediate social circle? And if you’re paying any attention to the news around the way streaming services, and Spotify in particular, treat independent artists, you’d know that musicians are paid next to nothing for streams of their songs. Songs have to be streamed in the thousands of times before a musician makes a penny, and perhaps in the tens of thousands or millions before a musician might be able to pay their electric bill. That might be a generous estimate. It’s understood that Spotify pays out about $0.006 for each stream. I’m no mathematician, but I don’t think that’s gonna pay the electric bill.
There are streaming services that do better by musicians. I abandoned Spotify years ago and use Tidal exclusively, and I made that change almost solely because of this particular aspect of the business model, and yet, I have been paid for music of mine played through streaming services an astounding ZERO times. I did get a nice check once from CDbaby because one of my songs had been used in a YouTube video, a video I have never seen. Total mystery. The best we could do, digging around in the data banks of our account, was to learn what song had been used and approximately how many times it had been viewed as a backdrop for who-knows-what kind of project. Suffice it to say, that the best way to support independent musicians is by purchasing their merchandise. And by going to their shows.
Let me move on to the rest of day of January 11th, 2025. Most of it is skippable, so let’s go straight to the evening. My alma mater, and the high school in which I spent 32 years as a teacher of English, hosted a watch party for a documentary film made about the indoor percussion troupe that my wife René has coached for the last 15 or 16 years. The documentary covers that history, but mostly focuses on 2024 as the pinnacle year in which the Rex Putnam Winter Indoor Percussion Ensemble traveled from Milwaukie, Oregon to Dayton, Ohio for the WGI World Championship. 2024 was a big year for them. Having won regional competitions in our neck of the woods repeatedly over the last 5 or 6 years, the Dayton World Championship found them as little fish in a gigantic pond, competing against the top groups in the entire country. So, with the magnitude of this opportunity, and taking advantage of a windfall in grant monies, they commissioned a short documentary film.
A friend of mine asked me a couple of weeks ago if I sometimes felt like a drum line widower. To a degree, it’s true that my wife’s commitment to the Rex Putnam Indoor Percussion ensemble has meant that we spend less time together, that we have difficulty continuing to make our own music together like we used to, and that most of any of her spare time outside of rehearsals and the other teaching she does is spent on some aspect of making the drum line go. The success of her program has been a kind of a personal loss for me, and yet, I am often in awe of the progress the group has made under her leadership, and how our son has become the highly skilled and mature young man he is today in large part because of his involvement in this, his mom’s, activity. I am exceedingly proud of them both, and it has been relatively easy to allow my selfishness to take a back seat and to support their drum line endeavors in the best way that I can. When you watch the documentary, and I hope that you do, I think it’s clear how the sacrifices, made by spouses or partners of those leading these activities and the parents and siblings of the young musicians dedicating thousands of hours to this craft, have been entirely worth it.
michael jarmer 