I canceled my streaming music distributor service
Happy Easter. Canceled my LANDR distribution subscription today (it was up for renewal tomorrow).
This does not mean Kid Lightbulbs is gone from streaming. Everything is still there. I have a few singles scheduled for streaming release (the last of the remixes from REMIXED CASTLE, between now and July), but theoretically those will still go out & I’ll just eat 15% of royalties.
I joked on Threads that this will only amount to something like 20¢, but realistically, it’s more like $2.46 based on how much LANDR has actually paid me out in the last year. Wow, that’s 10x more than I assumed! But it’s also 60% of the value of a single cup of coffee, and 5.1% of the total annual cost of the LANDR Distribution Pro subscription I just canceled ($47.80/year after taxes). I can eat this.
Why am I doing this? It’s not about LANDR’s new weird AI game, though I’m personally not a fan of it. For me it’s about streaming economics more broadly — I’m no longer seeing the value of constantly releasing singles to Spotify et al (and possibly never have), and it’s not how I want to position my work. I envision music in sets, as concept albums, as part of stories I try to tell. Spotify (and, given its market share and major label entanglements, the streaming ecosystem at large) incentivizes short, saccharine
In the meantime, I’m going to use the next while to focus on
- writing prose & new music
- sharing more of my WIP publicly, both on social platforms and in my newsletter
- live streaming on Bandcamp, Twitch and/or YouTube
- experimenting with my Bandcamp subscription and other commerce options
- not worrying about my monthly Spotify listener count, which it seems most of my peers worry about a lot
