Lately, I’ve been pretty inspired. Inspired by this post to conduct a little experiment.

Since Spotify came around in 2008, I’ve been wondering exactly what the new streaming economy means for musicians. On the one hand, its principle appeal early on was that it would discourage pirating, which, you know, is cool, but on the other hand the payments you receive from streams are almost ridiculously tiny.

So the question I’ve long had is this: is Spotify yet another example of a disruptive internet-based business that makes things absolutely awesome for consumers but really, really shitty for producers?

Since streaming services were replacing pay-for-download services like the iTunes store, it’s reasonable to expect that it might be. You see, when my old band (you can hear us here on Spotify!!) used to sell a download on iTunes, we’d get roughly half whatever the consumer paid for it. So a $9.99 full-length album would net us about 5 bucks. A $15 CD, and we’d get to walk away with a cool $8. Selling physical copies of the same record would earn us a similar amount.

Compare that to Spotify, with its tiny payouts of roughly $.005 per play. When we released Just One Bite, our Zombie Rock Opera soundtrack, we sold pretty much all 500 copies we printed in our first run. In order for us to earn the $4,000 of per-unit profit we earned from those physical sales, each one of those 500 people who bought the record would need to listen to the whole thing from start to finish roughly 123 times.

Now, I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at my personal listening habits, but 123 times is a lot of times to listen to the same record. It’s listening to the same record two times a week for a year. Or every day for about four months. Maybe when I was 14 I might have listened to Nine Inch Nails that much. But not much else.

So there’s good reason to believe that Spotify’s minuscule royalty payments represent something like a disaster for smaller artists like me. For people who can leverage volume, a low streaming rate is maybe not terrible. But if you’re only selling one or two discs at a gig… Well, you’re never gonna make up that difference pennies at a time.

But, on the other hand, there’s at least some reason to believe that Spotify might not be the artist apocalypse so many fear. It’s a lot cheaper to get your music on a streaming service than it was to have CDs made, and with advancements in home recording technology, the barrier for entry of making professional-quality recordings is really, really low. So maybe there’s an opportunity there.

So this inspired me to embark on a project. I want to try to make $8–or the amount that I would make from selling one CD at $15–on Spotify, in one month. I want to see how hard it is to make that much.

In order to do this, I’m planning on releasing one record per month for the rest of 2018, and depending on how that goes, into 2019. For the time being, I’ve got both time and something of a backlog of tracks ready to be pushed out into the world. The way I see it, the best case scenario is I achieve my goal and then start moving on into dollar amounts that can actually buy me a full meal out once a month. The worst case scenario is I have a deadline that causes me to create a lot more material than I otherwise would have, and don’t make any money.

So it’s a win-win!