How To Focus On MORE Than Just Streaming
Integrate physical media and digital downloads with streaming platforms to create a balanced music selling strategy. Embrace streaming for discovery while offering exclusive content and formats that appeal to dedicated fans.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today I want to go over how you can focus on more than just streaming platforms. Meaning, how to incorporate physical media and digital downloads into your music selling ecosystem in a world where you still embrace streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music etc.
Many people online seem to think that you have to do one or the other. That you’re either:
An artist that focuses on streaming
An artist that ignores streaming and focuses on physical media / digital downloads
A lot of the people in camp #2 use platforms such as Bandcamp, and sometimes even go as far as pulling their entire catalog off of Spotify, Apple Music and the rest to ‘increase the value of their music’.
The problem is, Bandcamp is a super niche platform (ask your non-musician friends about it, none of them have heard of it) that focuses mostly on selling the least desired form of music nowadays. Look at these stats, most artists on Bandcamp have never gotten a single sale.
However, i’m not saying saying you shouldn’t try and sell digital / physical versions of your music. The anti-streaming crowd is right about a few things:
Streaming doesn’t pay very well
Direct to consumer sales is a fantastic way to generate revenue for your music
There are people out there that still value music, and will pay for it
Streaming is great for discovery due to the algorithmic nature of these platforms, and most artists will make the bulk of their recorded music income from streaming. It’s incredibly easy to get someone to listen to your music on streaming because they already pay for it. Convincing someone to buy a digital download or physical copy is much harder.
Streaming is also incredibly passive, it requires no real work. While digital downloads also require no work, they’re the least preferred music format nowadays. It’s much easier to sell physical media than digital downloads - i’ve tried. Digital downloads don’t offer the collectable aspect of physical media and they don’t offer the convenience of streaming.
So, heres how you can be a reasonable person and utilize both streaming and sales.
The best of both worlds
This is all essentially what i’m planning to do for one of my bands Every Waking Moment as we gear back up to releasing music, and all of this i’ve done already on other people’s music. So this isn’t just theory, and i’m planning on personally doing a lot of this.
Since streaming is great for discovery and it’s how the vast majority of listeners listen to music nowadays, you definitely want to be on streaming platforms. But, that’s not it. For my band, we’re planning on doing these things:
Releasing our upcoming album on physical formats, digital downloads and streaming. Definitely CD because they’re dirt cheap and easy to ship, but most likely Vinyl too.
Making the digital download version of the album available on our online store as well, with extra tracks that won’t make it to streaming platforms. Also, people can buy it before the album comes out on streaming.
All song’s will be available on our store for purchase as digital download. Not only will they be available before they come out on streaming platforms, they’ll be priced at a premium and come with instrumental versions and/or stems. They’ll come with both MP3 and the highest quality we can export.
We’re thinking of making a monthly subscription / Patreon type thing where people get all of the digital music instead of having to buy it one-off.
The idea is that while the vast majority of music listeners listen on streaming platforms, there are people out there that will support the music they like. A couple weeks ago I wrote about selling CD’s and Vinyl in 2025, and showed a case study where 25% of customers opted to donate $5 to support the artist, with nothing in return.
By taking advantage of time exclusivity, exclusive tracks and limited edition media we’re just enabling fans to support us. Most fans will never go down this path but the super fans will.
Imagine if you market your music and get 100,000 streams from 30,000 listeners. This isn’t an unreasonable goal if you’re marketing your music. If we simply make available all these offers, not necessarily even promote them, and assume 0.1% (1/10th of 1%) of fans convert then that represents 30 sales.
Honestly even if we only get 10 sales from every 30,000 listeners, it’s very worth it. My band has had over 130,000 unique listeners in the past year so with this math we’d have 40+ customers passively, without even focusing on selling.
That being said, we are planning on a few ad strategies and email funnels to specifically focus on selling all of this stuff. But that’s a topic for another day!
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