11 Things Millennial Musicians Just Don’t Get, streams and fans.

I got this article in my feed and it's brilliant. As an artist (not just millennial) you have to read it to start to understand that some of the features are no longer there.

Here is the whole article
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2017/07/27/millennial-musicians/

I will discuss the 11 things what to do about them and how you should think. So we start with number one.

1) Spotify Plays Don’t Equal Fans

I can’t tell you how many artists I see on Spotify with hundreds of thousands or millions of streams, but can’t get even 100 out to their local (or any) shows. Or get anyone to back their crowdfunding campaign. Or support them in any way whatsoever. These listeners are not fans of the artists, they are fans of the playlist these songs got included on. You must understand this new world of streaming we are in. 10 million plays ain’t impressive anymore. Know what is impressive? Bottom lines.

The number crunching is really over. Sure we will have stupid people doing the number crunching for at least ten years more. The serious players though has just left that game. I wrote about this in the blog post "We don't care about your social media numbers"

The smart part of the industry knows you can manipulate any numbers and it's kind of easy to check so it gives no guarantee. You have to build real fans that are the only way. Still, right now it's easier than ever to actually do that. There are hundreds of different tools to use to keep in touch with the people who like the stuff you do. So staring yourself blind that you don't have that many Spotify streams is not getting you anywhere. When you get real fans and the word is spreading anyway it will come by the fault. So start doing what you should do, take every opportunity to perform your art in all possible ways. That is the secret trick. No, you can't just sit home and think you can do it behind your computer.

So when you bump into a stupid booker that only book bands that have over 50 000 followers on Facebook. Whatever this person is booking for it will go down fast. It won't be in your interest to be there anyway. In reality, many times they use that as an argument to not book you since you are not good enough. When you hit that value they won't care if you just have 10 followers on facebook.