Listen (4:18)
March 9, 2026
Indeed, but you can never leave. Messrs. Henley and Fry were on to something with that sublime turn of phrase in the little song inspired by goings-on inside the once-iconically pink hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Regarding the pink, newbie Joe Walsh was officially in it because he secured a new gig working on the eponymous album, released in 1976, and I think it’s safe to say it also kept him in the black. As of writing, the 2013 remaster of “Hotel California” has earned over 2 billion streams on Spotify, and the streamshare for a band like The Eagles is assuredly among the elite on that platform.
All of my tracks combined had earned 932,000 streams on Spotify, a platform I parted ways with 2 years ago this week, and a general assessment of the exit seemed biennially appropriate. It’s been brought to my attention more often than it presumably needs to be that my music is still on the platform; I haven’t completed the checkout process. It turns out that Spotify doesn’t ‘delete’ artists, so my catalog remains visible but not audible, as the tracks are grayed out and cannot be played. The platform itself does not remove the music; that procedure is initiated by the label, in my case, CD Baby. After requesting the split, it took a couple of weeks for those albums to fade to gray.
When living indoors and eating food are priorities, money is the primary factor in deciding to leave a platform. The money part is often the quiet part, and it’s worth saying the quiet part out loud when it comes to streaming music and an independent musician’s wallet. One direct album sale at $10 puts $8-10 in my pocket after transaction fees. To earn the same amount from streaming, I would need 20,000-25,000 plays. The labor required to earn that much engagement as an indie is as frustrating as it is Herculean. Playlist placement work is tedious, glacially slow, and, by 2024, with Spotify’s new minimum stream requirements in place to get paid at all, downright soul-blackening.
It also became increasingly apparent that a constant, consistent release strategy was creating more work for less remuneration, and the work itself was administrative, not creative. The penny dropped when it tempestuously dawned on me that if I spent the same amount of energy bringing folks I know, based on past and present engagement with what I’m offering, to the website by offering liner notes, bonus materials, and other content, including this blog, I would not only be better paid while eating safely indoors but my creativity too would be fed by simply putting out less stuff and spending more time refining what I did release.
The trade-off with this strategy is fewer opportunities for discovery. Two years later, however, I think it’s safe to say that the new folks brought into the tent by those Spotify playlists who stream my free stuff, listen to the podcast, buy my music, and read this blog (a thousand thanks to all of ye!) are enough. It took too long to realize that, for the same reason so many musicians either burn out or let their frustration turn to anger: ego. One needs healthy self-esteem to continually self-promote, to say, look at what I’m doing, and don’t forget to drop a few quid in the jar because this business isn’t fair. Ego is a mediator; it’s a sense of identity walking the fine line between desire and reality, and sometimes that sense of identity shifts its loyalty.
Once the honest calculation of how much is enough is complete, once musicians and other artists realize that their output is never “better” than someone else’s, it’s more usefully rationalized in terms of “as good as” to keep the promotion wheels turning and the ego in check, the work, the creative work, improves. With this improvement, I’m coming to realize, comes a renewal, a reaffirmation of the love of the craft itself. I’m thankful that the work I did on Spotify brought enough folks to my little corner of the internet, as that was the aim from the beginning; streaming was never going to pay the bulk of the bills. Letting go of the ego number game of monthly listeners, streams, and followers, completing my calculation, and focusing on getting better and trying to be more useful musically was the correct decision; all muses were satisfied in the end, and the Beverly Hills Hotel behind me, checkout complete.