The term Indie is a new term for India’s music industry. For the novice, Indie is defined in Western music as independent artists who produce their own music. Traditionally India’s music business revolved around the Bollywood movie industry, and it remained the same to a substantial extent till today. For any aspiring musician, success always meant becoming a Playback singer. In the last decade or so when supported by YouTube, many youngsters decide to delve into independent music production. The availability of excellent quality recording equipment and a revolution of social media influencers made it possible for many promising talents to find a world stage at the tip of their fingers. Few success names to list here are Nucleya, Emiway Bantai, Gajendra Verma, Darshan Raval, Divine, Shirley Setia, Arjun Kanungo, Nikhil D’Souza, Vivek Verma, Badshah, Amit Trivedi, Shravan J Nair, Shubham Sarita, Papon, Benny Dayal, Jonita Gandhi, and Sanam Puri.
The aim of this analysis is to understand the business aspect of this music industry and look at the 2022 top 10 Indie artists who made business through music streaming. When you decide to make your own music, you have two choices, one is to find a contract to sign with a recording company. This option, although it allows you to make your own music the ultimate choice of what you write, comes from the recording label’s interests. So, in a way, this is semi-independent production.
A true indie artist is someone who writes, records, produces merchandise, markets, publicizes, and deals with all financial dealings of record production. The best part of this is every penny that you make from your music goes to your pocket. A lot of different artists that you hear today as grammy winning artists came as independent artists and they all had put their 10,000 hours of arduous work behind every music that they produced. Listen to Ed Sheeran in this embed here.
We also wanted to see how an Indie artist can make a living. To make real money your song must be played millions of times over the streaming services. The number of artists out there whose streaming total is a million and to that matter billion accounts for 0.000002% of total artists. In the prorate model that is sued by streaming services like Spotify, this is what one may expect. For example, an indie artist who signs up with a streaming service like Spotify pays their artists $0.0038 per stream on average. For a reasonable number of 10,000 streams, the payout is between $60 to $84. This is not revenue that sustains any musician to find a living out of this business. There are plenty of other streaming services like Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer’s, Pandora, Soundcloud, Amazon Music, and Tidal. All streaming services have a unique style of royalty payment to the artists. For example, Deezer pays directly to the artist when a fan clicks their favorite artist’s song on their platform. Apple Music seems to advertise that they pay $0.01 / stream and that is the highest of many available there. That is about $6 to $10 per one thousand streams. Following are the payout rates for the major streaming services as royalties to artists.
Apple Music 0.01; YouTube Music 0.008; Deezer 0.0064
Briefly, online streaming services do not make a constant income, yet it is money for an artist’s hard work. Many artists make more money from their tours and on-stage performances. It is also a true test of the artist, if he /she is good people will recognize their talent. There is no straightforward way out. Take your band out and go perform out there. Even if only one person is listening to your music it is a beginning, that listener is the very first fan of your music. Cherish all the small steps. Many artists thus tend to be in a main profession other than music and that is not a feasible method to pursue a career as a full-time professional. The scene is changing rapidly with social media platforms allowing you to post your songs on their platforms.
Anything is achievable provided one sets targets and works towards them. Failures guaranteed. Learn from the failures and don’t hesitate a minute after each failure to get up and try again with the lessons learned from the previous failures in perspective. Each time you will do a better job than the previous time. Small improvements at each time will make big improvements and make your final product perfect.
The great India Singers on Smule Sing 