Streams, Setbacks, and Sync Licensing

Hey friend,

I hope you've been well!  

Recently my song Even was deleted off of Spotify for nearly 2 weeks, wiping 800k+ streams off of my catalog, and taking me from 180k monthly listeners down to 60k.

I was super disappointed this happened, and it has actually happened before to the same song! Luckily the label was able to get it back the first time and all of the streams were still there. This time I’m not so sure.

After 2 weeks, the song appears to be back on Spotify, but it is currently showing 0 all time streams, and in my backend stats I can see 1.1 million, which is a weird discrepancy. I am hopeful that it is a glitch and the streams will come back soon, but if not it’s a pretty big hit to my momentum as an artist.

This situation is annoying and out of my hands, but I have to remind myself that it is out of my control. All I can do is email the label and see what our best course of action is, and hope that they can get the distributor to fix the situation.

My best guess is that some playlists that it was in had bots and it caused Spotify to remove it due to a violation of their terms. The label denies that bots were involved as they are strongly against botted plays, but what else could it be? Just a strange glitch, possibly?

I have found myself really inspired to write music for sync licensing the past year anyway, and have been cranking out a song a week and uploading them into music libraries with the hope of building my catalog and in the future having a nice recurring royalty stream from placements.

It is a long game no doubt, but it isn’t reliant on me signing to labels, dealing with promotion and streams, or building my artist brand and playing shows all the time. I love all of those things, don’t get me wrong, but having another outlet for my creativity is nice.

As I get older I find myself wanting to be in clubs less often, and I feel most creative when I’m in my studio creating music. Sync licensing gives me that ability and I don’t have to worry about stats and streaming numbers as much. I think my end game as a music producer is a studio rat, making records for people, composing for projects, sync music, and releasing as an artist when I feel like it.

The non stop grind of the artist life is hard to keep up with! I will always put music out as Elazion, as I love the sound I make, but having the ability to make music in different genres is a really cool way to keep my creativity fresh and not worry about burn out so much.

I find that it’s important to question your direction sometimes when you feel unsure about where you should go next. Do I want to be on tour 9 months of the year at 35 with a kid at home? Not really. Do I want to make music forever, absolutely! Do I still want to play shows and do cool things as an artist? Definitely! I don’t think these things have to be mutually exclusive either, as I can think of a lot of artists that make great music and don’t tour much but it does seem to be less common.

I know i’m not the only one who feels this way, as it seems to be most common thing I hear when producers transition into sync licensing. Many of them get tired of being on the road and feel that it drains their ability to actually make great music.

Success in sync licensing is also quite hard and takes a lot of time to build a catalog, but there are no easy paths to success in music, or in any other field to be honest. There is always a grind and there will always be an uphill battle. The only question is, what hill do you want to climb?

If you have ever felt the same way about any of this, I’d love to hear from you!

 Take care my friend,

- Niko