End-of-year stats prove interesting, once again

Post date: Jan 7, 2018 7:40:52 PM

I checked into some end-of-year type statistics recently for last year for music streaming. For reasons that are slightly beyond my grasp, this online music streaming service called Spotify seems to be the most popular one now with most people I know. It used to be CDs, then iTunes, and now everyone is using Spotify, but I can't really figure out why.

Despite their popularity, Spotify all of a sudden seems to be paying attention to the non-major-label artists of the world who distribute through aggregators, even though I doubt I've ever received even one single penny in royalties from people streaming me on there. I can tell you that like Bandcamp, and Google Play, and to a lesser extent Amazon, they are starting to act like they care about musicians like me who are self-contained DIY/lo-fi/indie solo artists, though not significantly closing the gap yet.

According to Spotify for Artists, I had a whopping 235 fans in 2017, which I think is good (for me, that is).

Anyway, this post is about you reading along and wanting to join me as I pat myself on the back I guess...with some infographics.

Here are some more stats you can only be impressed with:

795 listeners and 956 streams since 2015, peaking with the mid-year release in 2016 of my last album.

Doing well with the age 35 to 59 crowd, as would be expected, but surprisingly, not bad with today's teens! Crazy, weird, wild, wacky stuff.

As far as the geographic locations of listeners, being big in Australia and New Zealand are a thrill, but not as much of a stretch as non-English speaking countries like Germany and Mexico, which is almost shocking, but great.

The top cities were not Flint, Grand Blanc, Vail, Avon, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Cadillac, Traverse City, Bay City, or even Petoskey, although all of those were on there as expected. Instead, the biggest cities in the US were Pittsburgh PA, Greensboro NC, Baton Rouge LA, and Tempe AZ, believe it or not. So, on Spotify anyway, I'm bigger in those places than anywhere in my home state!

Even more exciting than that is that I'm bigger in Herne, Germany and Bristol, United Kingdom than I am anywhere in the US!! Thornburry and North Lakes, Australia were also areas where I'm popular. All of this is amazing and great to hear about!

They also had one of those "fans-also-fans-of" sections with a bunch of artists I'd never heard of before, but included was the flattering fellow Michigander, Kate Monaghan.

If you like me, you might also like her I suppose, and although I never remember to endorse others very often, I can honestly say I'm a fan of her style and what I've heard, so check her out here if you want to: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1un4k5w69ir0l2eVNYm4v0