The world we live in today is evolving at a rapid rate and this affects every career path as well as every aspect of our lives. Content delivery in many forms including entertainment is made easier than before with just a click of a button.
There is, therefore, the need for a gospel musician to adjust accordingly in order to make the necessary impact through their music. We now experience constant improvement of music digitization across many platforms and we must as a matter of urgency school ourselves to derive the needed benefit.
Let’s take a look at the very common reasons why you need to submit your gospel songs to a digital streaming platform as a mainstream gospel singer or an emerging one.
1. This is the new normal.
Hard copy CD is gone for good, pen drives, and keeping of songs on phones and other portable devices are fading away gradually and pointing us to a new era of streaming and digital platforms. People hardly print CD’s or sell custom album pen drives lately.
The question is, why should I keep limited music on my phone with limited storage when I could actually have access to the world’s music on the go with just as little as $3.99 monthly subscription?
As a music person, giving away less than GHC25 to listen to music for thirty (30) days, plus the convenience of choosing any music, artist, or album I like is worth the money.
2. Global Listenership
Once the availability of your gospel music is not restricted to CD’s, and other local music websites, you have the chance of entering a bigger market of listenership. At a simple search of your artist’s name or music, you could also have a fair share of these listeners enjoying your music without necessarily knowing you or where you come from.
Let me give you a little breakdown in terms of active users for a few platforms (Data between mid-2019 and early 2020):
- Spotify – 130 million active users
- Apple Music – over 70 million subscribers
- Deezer – 14 Million users
- Google Music – 15 million users
Millions of people around the world listen to music on these platforms monthly, and this is growing every month and it is just reasonable that you too can tap into the pool of audience and push your gospel music through.
3. Earn Money
Believe me, everyone wants to make money from their intellectual property including music regardless of the genre. At the end of the day, the subscribers of these platforms indirectly pay the artist for their work every time they stream a song.
These popular platforms (Spotify, iTunes, Google Music, Pandora, Deezer, Amazon Music etc) pay every registered artist on their platform base on their terms and conditions which includes the number of streams per song.
So I was thinking to myself, why would I let my songs lie dormant, waiting on a radio DJ to play, or for a fan to go download it only from a local website when I can actually make continuous passive income submitting them to a known streaming platform.
Don’t get me wrong, blogging about your song or submitting your song on a music blog isn’t a bad thing at all. All I am saying is do not let this be the last stop. Submitting your song on a music blog would probably make people around you become more and more familiar with you and your music. But taking it a step further to work with the digital stores opens a bigger opportunity for you. Let’s look at some of these opportunities in the next point.
4. Bigger Opportunities
On these renowned online music streaming/download platforms, you have the potential of increasing your fan base daily and this is not limited to your country or geographical location.
The good thing about some of these platforms is the use of powerful algorithms and high-level machine language which helps the system to automatically detect your musical taste. What this means is, once the system records that you love gospel music (taking into consideration your history and other characteristics), it is able to suggest a similar song or an artist for you.
For instance, if I am listening to a song from Joe Mettle (a contemporary worship artist), the system uses the basic information about Joe Mettle and may list an appropriate artist from Ghana or Africa as a recommendation. You could be listed as well as a recommendation as well.
Another great opportunity is for your song to be listed on local and international charts based on certain criteria or how well your song is doing generally.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we are moving towards a complete use of streaming platforms for entertainment needs. Even though some people ‘cry’ for their data, they still stream Netflix movies anyway. The same applies to music. More and more people are discovering the fun and convenience of streaming quality audio music for a monthly subscription. Some people will complain about their data first, but if you’re really a music person, using less than 150MB of data an hour for streaming good music is nothing.
In light of these things, it is imperative to get your music uploaded on these platforms as a gospel artist. This even gives you a better brand in the eyes of your fans. Streaming platforms also help you to discover new fans globally as you make passive income.
