Recent years have turned the music industry on it’s head and how band’s can profit from doing what they love. Spotify is currently one of the tools that many artists turn to and Lich King drummer Brian Westbrook took to his band’s Facebook to break down just how big a role the service plays when it comes to helping a band out. Here’s what he had to say:
Looks like we ruffled a few feathers. We get it – it’s 2014, downloading music is rampant, people buy merch and come to shows instead after discovering us, it’s not easy to find our CDs everywhere, everyone’s broke, fine. We know the landscape of the music industry has changed in the past 15 years, that the status quo is that music itself is free, and bands have to adapt to it and make money elsewhere.
Downloading or torrenting our music admittedly might be helpful for getting our name out there, but then we just have to hope that those people who do so are kind enough to follow up and buy a shirt or come out to a show. We know there’s plenty of you out there who do just that, and we can’t thank you enough for it, seriously.
The thing is, we’ve made it incredibly easy to listen to our music for free. Our entire discography is up on YouTube, Spotify, Bandcamp, Grooveshark, and a bunch of other sites that we’re probably not even aware of. Any time you stream our music on those, it helps us out, even if it’s just a fraction of a cent at a time.
But here’s some math – we have 65,000 fans here on Facebook. If every single one of you listened to just ONE song of ours on Spotify once a day for a month straight, it would cover our gas for an entire U.S. tour. Or flights to Europe or Mexico or South America or anywhere else we haven’t toured yet. Or studio time for a new full-length album.
And that’s just one song per person per day. Imagine if all of you queued up a playlist of a couple hundred Lich King songs a day and just let it run in the background while you were at work, browsing through Facebook, playing video games, you get the idea. We could literally tour anywhere you guys ask, print all the crazy merch ideas we have in our heads, finally get around to shooting a music video, put out albums faster than every three years – there’s so much stuff we would love to be doing and sharing with you all if we could afford it.
If you want to listen to our music for free, that’s totally fine. All we ask is that if you want to do that AND support us at the same time, please try and listen somewhere that actually makes an impact on helping us financially.
Thanks everyone.
– Brian