Streaming is where it’s at these days for musicians, established or independent. Rather than sales we are now chasing listeners and streams. Or are we chasing streams? That word in itself can cause quite a bit of controversy. Some would claim that streaming is what you do when the list is playing and you’re not listening. Listening would then mean that you pay attention and enjoy the music. Yet another form of streaming is when some bot is playing 31 seconds of the song. Still they are all equal to the artist on the bottom line. So where does this leave us? The most upright approach is probably to only go for real fans and listeners. We are musicians and what do stats matter, we want our fans to hear our music. Still I doubt that any of us could honestly say that we completely follow that path. To get anything back from the hard work we put in we need some money, which also means we need streams. But if we are on an official Spotify playlist, that must be ok? Well that isn’t the easiest thing in the world to achieve. So to start off we need to do something else. We can create playlists with our friends on and we all stream them. That can’t be too bad, it’s small scale after all. And then there is this other playlist with many followers. If we get added to that our stats will improve. We don’t really know if it’s real or fake, but who can blame us if we don’t know. So that turned out alright, but we still need to grow a bit more. There’s this other list, but they charge us £10 to be added. Ok, it’s not that much money and the stats are good, it’s worth a shot. And when we already pay for streams anyway we might as well pay for that promotion with obviously fake streams once… or twice. Then we are sliding down the slippery slope of decadence. Or are we? Where do we stop, where do we draw the line? Our gut feeling will often tell us what is real and what is fake, but we can never tell for sure. The life of the musician in streaming age is not easy. The difference between the moral high road and the deprived dungeon is sometimes slim. So good luck with the balancing on the razor’s edge and may you be content with your choices, only you can make them.

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