HIT PLAY BILLBOARD
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Sign up for the most unique global music listening campaign in the world.

Each week, certified music reactors and live reviewers nominate one standout song from thousands of independent artist submissions for the Hit Play Billboard. A playlist is created from this list of hand-selected tracks.

This newsletter serves as a targeted listening campaign where we use our streaming subscriptions to help independent artists. By listening to the same playlist together, we can affect real change in each artists life.

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One listen this week might not feel like much, but 37,000+ coordinated listens? That’s the kind of boost an independent artist can feel.

Why Your One Listen Matters

 

Streaming services pay $0.0025 to $0.0035 per stream (realistically) – insultingly low, yes, but when an artist owns 100% of their publishing and master rights, every stream counts.

With 37,000+ subscribers, if each of us listens to this playlist just once this week, we generate:

37,000 streams per song (if you listen to the full playlist)

Which can generate $80 to $110 per song in streaming revenue this week.

Imagine when our list grows to 300,000+ subscribers—an artist could make $1,000 in streams for just one song.

This is what targeted listening can do. Instead of spreading our streams across a handful of artists who already have billions of plays (I’m talking about T-Swift, Kendrick, Drake etc.), we focus our attention where it actually makes an impact.

The Reality of Streaming Subscriptions

 

If you’re like the other 2.3 billion paying music listeners in the world, you’re likely already subscribed to Spotify, Apple Music, or Tidal. Crazy enough, most of your $14.99 (or whatever you’re paying) subscription never reaches the most deserving artists. Spotify’s current payment model means:

You’d have to stream 4-5 hours of music every day (roughly 2,000+ streams per month) just to “use” your subscription in a way that offsets Spotify’s profit cut. Not to mention the 1,000 play minimum requirement means most songs from independent artists don’t see a single cent.

That’s unrealistic for most of us. But listening to one focused playlist once per week? That’s easy—and it’s how we extract money and put it in the hands of hard working artists!

I will never support the way streaming platforms treat artists, but we can’t deny that 95% of your audience will stream your music from a major streaming platform. If we shy away from this fact, we only hurt the independent artists. We can, in fact, make meaningful impacts through these platforms, but only as a large collective listening together. 

This newsletter will deliver our playlists from multiple platforms to give you the ability to support the businesses you want. We plan to start with Apple, Spotify and Tidal with plenty more to come.

 

Like in many cases, our power is in numbers.

 

Similar to shopping at a small business, we can support these artists with our ears. We will make it easy every week – and continue to deliver a wonderful playlist right to your inbox. 

 

I appreciate you joining along for the ride.