We caught up with a handful of Cleveland artists to hear more about how they confront the divisive world of music streaming. Hear from Cleveland musician Chris B. Harris, aka DJ $crilla, below, and a few other musicians here.
Streaming Earnings: Chris B. Harris, who has created music under the alias DJ $crilla, spends most of his creative energy crafting music for sync placements in TV and movies. His streaming earnings pale in comparison to that work; Harris made about $275 off of streaming last year. “I’ve spent more than that on one song, just creating a song, start-to-finish,” Harris says.
Pros and Cons: Streaming’s biggest downside is that it isn’t a sustainable revenue source, Harris says — and that stems from longtime trends in the industry. “I think we’re in a time, and we’ve been in this era for quite some time, where music seems to be a bit devalued,” Harris says. “I think we started to see this once piracy became really big, with things like Napster and Limewire. Quite frankly, people just don’t tend to feel that they need to pay for music these days.”
However, streaming websites do help Harris get exposure for his music. “It seems everyone uses some type of streaming service to gather their content, whether that be music or television or movies, so just having your music available on a streaming service is helpful, because it opens the access up to so many different people.”
Making Money: Harris relies on sync placements to make money in music. His songs have earned placements with Netflix, Hulu, the NFL, CBS, MTV and more. “Having my songs played in TV shows, movies, video games — that is how I’m able to make money doing music,” Harris says. “I don’t do shows, really, so I don’t have any performance fees or anything like that. And I don’t really sell merchandise, so I’m also missing out on opportunities there.”
His work in the film industry has directly corresponded with streams online. Harris says his second-most-streamed song in his discography was placed in a Netflix movie. “Likely someone watched the movie, Shazamed it — that’s how they found the song, and that’s how I started to get those streams.”
The Outlook: Concerns around streaming aren’t going to be resolved soon, Harris thinks. “It doesn’t look like a positive outlook, especially if revenue is going to get cut for artists, most artists,” the musician says. “Most local artists, they're not making an incredible amount of revenue via streaming. They’ll make the revenue with performances, merchandise.”
The Bottom Line: Harris dreams big about what he’d like to see in a sustainable music world. “I really would love to see, in a perfect world — let's get back to the model where we're purchasing physical copies of music,” he says. “I know that's a long shot, and probably not likely. But I think that it's probably the best option for artists.”
Read more Cleveland musicians' experiences with streaming sites here.
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