I used to believe streaming was simply the way things were now. You put your music on Spotify, people listen, something small but fair comes back, and that’s the exchange. Not glamorous, not ideal, but workable.
Over time, that belief slowly fell apart.
This isn’t about numbers anymore. It’s about what it feels like to spend years making something, to pour money you don’t have into studio time and collaborators, and then watch your work get treated as background noise in a system that was never built for you to survive in.
That’s why I don’t release my full albums on Spotify anymore. And why I choose to release them on Mycelium instead.
The Illusion of Access
Most people assume artists just upload songs to Spotify and wait for streams. In reality, you cannot even put your music there without paying someone to deliver it for you. A distributor takes a yearly fee. If you stop paying, your music disappears. If your music disappears, you lose whatever tiny visibility you had and start again from nothing.
You pay to exist.
And what comes back rarely feels like income. It feels symbolic. A few dollars here. A few euros there. Not even enough to cover the fee that allowed you to be present in the first place.
It’s not just about the money being small. It’s about the imbalance. You give years of work. The system gives you pocket change and tells you to be grateful for the exposure.
When Small Means Worthless
In late 2023, Spotify introduced a policy that tracks under 1,000 streams per year would not receive royalties. Those earnings would be redirected elsewhere.
The message underneath that decision is hard to ignore. If you are small, you do not count.
It does not matter that someone pressed play. It does not matter that a real human listened. If you did not reach the right volume, your work becomes free fuel for the machine.
For independent artists, this is devastating in a quiet way. It tells you your effort is measurable only by scale. That your worth is defined by thresholds.
“Just Make More Music”
Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, once suggested that artists cannot release music once every three or four years and expect to earn enough.
I started recording my current album in early 2022. It has cost me over five thousand euros so far. Studio time, musicians, travel, logistics. None of that includes paying myself. I ran out of money before I ran out of ideas.
Albums take time. Songs need space. Real collaboration is not content production. It is human work.
When someone says the cost of creating content is close to zero, I wonder which reality they are living in. Because it is not mine.
What It Feels Like
It feels like building something fragile and meaningful, then placing it inside a system that reduces it to data. It feels like competing against algorithms that reward frequency over depth. It feels like being told that if you cannot keep up, you simply do not deserve to be there.
Meanwhile, subscription prices rise. Profits grow. Staff are laid off. And independent artists are expected to adapt quietly.
At some point, I had to ask myself whether staying was a choice or just habit.
Why Mycelium
Mycelium is my attempt to step out of that loop.
It allows me to release music without asking permission from a distributor. It allows listeners to support the work directly. It allows albums to exist as albums, not just as fragmented tracks optimized for playlists.
It is smaller. It is slower. It does not promise virality.
But it feels honest.
When someone listens there, I know the connection is intentional. The support is not diluted. The work is not filtered through a system that has already decided how much I am worth.
If you want continuous and fair access to my art, you can find it at mycelm.com.
This Is Not About Rage
It would be easy to frame this as anger. And yes, there is frustration. But mostly, there is clarity.
Streaming platforms are designed to reward scale. I do not operate at scale. I operate in depth, in time, in care.
If that means my music lives outside the dominant platform, so be it.
I would rather build something sustainable and human than chase a system that asks me to become more efficient, more constant, more disposable.
So I do not release my full albums on Spotify.
I release them where they can breathe.
On Mycelium.