At some point within the last 20 years, reality branched to a fork where people no longer own copies of their favorite music. Instead, we are forced to either listen to a continual stream of advertisements or pay a perpetual leasing fee to even access the music we love and cherish. The moment you stop paying for the service, you lose access to all of your music. The music is only accessible offline if you pay excessive fees, and you cannot utilize the files for personal creative use like a fun family video.

Streaming was touted as a win for artists. The claims were that music artists can now distribute their music easily and make solid money while doing it! These claims proved to be untrue. Artists who do not have access to major labels or massive advertising budgets struggle to get recommended by the streaming service algorithms. Streaming platforms like Spotify pay only $0.001 per minute of music streamed. This means that in order for an artist to make $1, a listener must stream their music for 1000 minutes. To make $1000, artists need their listeners to stream their music for 1,000,000 minutes. To make a reasonable living in America, an artist would need people to stream their music for 5,000,000 minutes every month.

While these numbers are achievable over time, the lack of proper pay compared to traditional revenue sources such as record sales and radio air play means that artists don’t make nearly as much money as they used to from music consumption AND artists who are just beginning and building their fanbase will not be able to make a sustainable living during their development and building phases of their community.

Rather than resign to the terrible streaming model, we here at Happy Place Music refuse to play this terrible game. So, we are creating a new one!