Streaming pays artists fractions of a cent. Buying a record or a CD is one of the most direct ways to keep the music you love alive. Here is why that still matters in 2026.
 

I want to tell you something about streaming that the platforms would prefer you did not think about too carefully.

When you stream a song, the artist receives a payment. That payment varies by platform and by a number of factors including the artist's distribution deal and their negotiated rate, but for most independent artists without a major label the number lands somewhere between a third of a cent and half a cent per stream.

To earn one thousand dollars from streaming at those rates, an independent artist needs somewhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand streams. Not for the album. For one thousand dollars. In a year where the median rent in most American cities is well over a thousand dollars a month.

I am not telling you this to make you feel guilty about streaming. I use streaming. It has a place in a music listening life and a real role in how independent artists reach new audiences. What I want you to understand is that streaming as a support mechanism for independent artists, the thing people mean when they say streaming has democratized music, is largely a fiction that benefits platforms far more than it benefits the people who make the music.

Buying physical music is not nostalgia. It is one of the most economically direct ways to support the artists you love. Here is the full case.

THE ECONOMICS ARE NOT CLOSE

When you buy a vinyl record or a CD directly from an independent artist, at a show or through their website or on a platform like Bandcamp, the artist receives a revenue share that is orders of magnitude larger than what streaming delivers.

A vinyl record sold directly from an artist for thirty dollars might net the artist fifteen to twenty dollars after production costs. A CD sold for fifteen dollars might net the artist eight to ten. A digital download sold through Bandcamp at ten dollars delivers around eight dollars to the artist after platform fees.

Compare that to streaming. At half a cent per stream, that same ten-dollar digital download is equivalent to two thousand streams. The vinyl record at twenty dollars net is equivalent to four thousand streams. Not four thousand streams of one song. Four thousand streams of anything in that artist's catalog.

Physical music and direct digital purchases are not marginally better for artists than streaming. They are transformatively better. The economics are not comparable. They exist in different categories.

This does not mean you should stop streaming. Discovery through streaming is real and valuable. An artist who appears in a playlist and reaches ten thousand new listeners benefits from that even if the streaming revenue is negligible. The streaming platform functions as a discovery mechanism. The question is what you do after you discover something you love.

If you love an artist, buy their music. The difference between a streaming listener and a buying listener, from the artist's perspective, is not incremental. It is the difference between a signal that costs nothing and a transaction that actually sustains.

WHY VINYL AND CDS ARE GENUINELY BACK

This is not a case I am making based on wishful thinking. The numbers support it.

Vinyl revenue in the United States surpassed one billion dollars recently for the first time since the early 1980s. That is not a niche market or a collector's hobby. That is a mainstream cultural movement that has been building for over fifteen years and shows no signs of reversing.

CD sales, which most people had written off completely, have been increasing year over year. The driver is partly a younger audience that never experienced CDs as a primary format and is discovering them as a tactile, affordable alternative to vinyl. A CD is cheaper to produce and cheaper to buy than vinyl, the audio quality is excellent, and the format carries a specific cultural resonance for people who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s that has created its own revival energy.

The reason physical music is returning is not primarily technical. People are not buying records because they have concluded that vinyl is measurably superior to streaming audio in every scenario. They are buying records because the relationship between a listener and a physical object is a fundamentally different relationship than the one between a listener and a streaming queue.

A record has a sleeve with artwork that you hold in your hands. It has liner notes you can read. It has a side A and a side B that impose a sequence the artist intended. It requires you to get up and interact with it when the side ends. All of those things create a different quality of attention than a streaming interface optimized for passive consumption. And that attention is what music deserves at its best.

WHAT PHYSICAL MUSIC DOES FOR THE LISTENER

I have over two hundred records in my collection. I have been adding to that collection for most of my adult life. And I want to describe something that happens when I listen to a record that does not happen when I listen to the same music on a streaming platform.

I sit down with it.

That sounds trivial and it is not. The physical nature of vinyl, the need to handle the record, to set the needle, to be present enough to flip the side, creates a condition of intentional listening that streaming almost never produces. Streaming is designed to be frictionless. You can engage with it without making a single deliberate decision after the initial tap. That frictionlessness is convenient and it is also corrosive to the quality of attention you bring to what you are hearing.

When I put on a record I know I am going to sit with it for the duration of the side. That commitment changes what I hear. I notice things in recordings I have heard dozens of times that I had never noticed in streaming. Not because the vinyl is revealing hidden information, though the technical case for analog playback has some merit I have written about elsewhere. But because I am paying attention in a different way.

The music I love deserves that attention. The musicians who made it deserve a listener who is present. Physical music creates that listener more reliably than streaming does.

WHAT BUYING PHYSICAL MUSIC COMMUNICATES

There is something beyond the economics that I want to name directly.

When you buy a record or a CD from an independent artist, you are doing something that the streaming model has almost entirely eliminated from the music listening experience. You are making a choice.

Streaming is passive. The algorithm presents options, you tap, music plays. Your engagement with any particular artist is nearly effortless to begin and equally effortless to end. The artist has no way of knowing whether you chose them specifically or whether you arrived because a recommendation engine put them in front of you.

Buying physical music is active. You made a deliberate decision that this music is worth the money, the space it will occupy, and the commitment of ownership. You are now in a relationship with this music in a way that is categorically different from having it in a playlist.

For an independent artist, those two kinds of listeners are not equivalent. The buyer is the one who comes to shows. The buyer is the one who tells their friends. The buyer is the one who leaves a review, who shares the record, who becomes part of the story of how the music spreads.

Streaming builds audiences. Buying builds communities. Both matter and they are not the same thing.

THE CASE FOR BUYING TONY OSO MUSIC DIRECTLY

I want to be transparent about the personal stake I have in this argument because I think the transparency strengthens it rather than undermining it.

I make music as Tony Oso. I release it independently. I do not have a major label funding the production costs, promoting the releases, or supporting the infrastructure of building an audience. Every dollar that reaches me from music goes directly back into making more music, better recordings, more shows, and the continued existence of the Tony Oso project as a viable independent endeavor.

When you stream my music I am grateful for the listen and the discovery. When you buy my music, through my website, at a show, or on a platform where the revenue share reflects the actual value of the transaction, you are directly sustaining the capacity to make more of it.

That is not a guilt argument. It is a transparency argument. I want the people who love this music to understand what supporting it actually means in practice, so they can make an informed decision about whether and how they want to do it.

The music is made from real things. A spinal condition that changed how I understand pain and creativity. Songs written for people I was watching head somewhere bad. Years of engineering that trained a way of thinking that shows up in how I approach a recording. Two hundred records that shaped how I hear sound. Guitars I have been playing for fifteen and twenty years that carry the history of that playing in how they respond.

That is what you are buying when you buy physical music from an independent artist. Not just audio files. The record of a specific person's serious engagement with the world.

That is worth something. I hope this post helps make clear how much.

Tony Oso

Buy Tony Oso music directly at tonyosomusic.com/music

Subscribe at tonyosomusic.com to stay connected to the music and to know when new releases are available. Physical copies available at shows and through the site.

These are the songs that go where most people are too afraid to go. I know that space well. I wrote one of them.

There is a specific kind of song that does something no conversation can quite do.

It says the thing that everyone in the room knows is true but that nobody has found a way to say out loud yet. It names the situation directly, without softening it, without wrapping it in metaphor so thick that the meaning gets lost, without pretending that there is an easy answer when there is not one.

Songs about addiction and recovery are that kind of song at their best. And at their best they do something genuinely important. They reach people who need to be reached in a moment when the usual channels have closed. A person who will not take a phone call will sometimes sit with a song. A person who has stopped listening to the people around them will sometimes listen to a voice through a speaker that sounds like it understands.

I know this territory. I wrote "Going Down" for the people I watched heading toward addiction before it was too late to reach them. That song came from a specific place, a specific fear, a specific window that I knew was closing. I want to talk about that song alongside the other songs on this list, because I think the conversation about where music like this comes from and what it is trying to do is part of what makes it useful.

Here are the songs that do it best.

ALICE IN CHAINS — ROOSTER

Rooster is not technically about addiction. It is about Jerry Cantrell's father's experience in Vietnam. But the album it lives on, Dirt, is one of the most unflinching documents of addiction and its consequences ever recorded in rock music, and Rooster is the song that shows how that darkness connects to something larger than itself. Layne Staley's vocal performance on Dirt is one of the most haunting in rock history partly because the listener knows, in retrospect, exactly what he was living through when he sang it. The art and the life are inseparable in a way that makes Dirt an almost unbearable listen and an essential one.

ALICE IN CHAINS — DOWN IN A HOLE

Staying with Alice in Chains because no other band in the history of rock music has come closer to the inside of addiction as a lived experience translated directly into sound. Down in a Hole from Dirt describes the specific quality of being trapped not by external circumstance but by something inside yourself that you cannot reason with or outrun. The imagery of a hole you have dug yourself, that is familiar and terrible and yours, is one of the most accurate descriptions of addiction psychology ever put into a rock lyric.

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS — UNDER THE BRIDGE

Under the Bridge is Anthony Kiedis writing about his relationship with heroin with more honesty and more literary precision than almost anyone has managed on the subject. The song is not about the drug. It is about the loneliness that the drug temporarily resolved and the specific geography of Los Angeles that Kiedis associated with that loneliness. The bridge of the city of angels. The place he went to be alone with his addiction. The concreteness of the imagery is what makes it last. It is not a song about addiction in the abstract. It is a song about this person, this city, this feeling, this choice.

THE NATIONAL — BLOODBUZZ OHIO

The National write about anxiety and alcohol and the weight of a life not quite working in a way that is more indirect than the other songs on this list but no less accurate. Bloodbuzz Ohio is about being carried by something you did not choose and cannot put down. The debt metaphor runs through the whole song but what it is actually describing is familiar to anyone who has used something to manage feelings that would otherwise be unmanageable. The National's genius is making that recognition feel literary rather than clinical.

COUNTING CROWS — MR. JONES

Mr. Jones is a song about wanting to be different from what you are, wanting to be seen and celebrated in a way that will solve the fundamental problem of being yourself. That desire, the belief that external recognition will fix the internal deficit, is one of the most common psychological engines behind addiction and it is almost never named as such in the conversation about addiction. Counting Crows named it in 1993 in one of the most commercially successful songs of the decade. Most people who love this song have never consciously recognized what it is actually about.

PEARL JAM — BLACK

Black is a breakup song on its surface and one of the most direct and devastating descriptions of loss and the inability to let go ever recorded in rock music underneath that surface. I include it here not because it is a song about addiction specifically but because the state it describes, the refusal to accept that something is gone, the holding on to something that is already over, is the psychological cousin of what addiction does. Eddie Vedder's vocal performance is one of the most emotionally honest things in the rock canon. The song earns its reputation completely.

JOHNNY CASH — HURT (NINE INCH NAILS COVER)

Trent Reznor wrote Hurt. Johnny Cash made it something else entirely. Cash recorded his version in 2002, near the end of his life, and the result is one of the most devastating documents of regret and loss in American music. Reznor has said publicly that Cash's recording made him feel like the song was no longer his. The video, directed by Mark Romanek, shows Cash at the end of his life surrounded by the remnants of his past, his addiction, his career, his love for June Carter. It is almost unbearable to watch and it is the version that people will be listening to a hundred years from now.

TONY OSO — GOING DOWN

I wrote Going Down for specific people. People I watched heading somewhere bad in the period before it became obvious to everyone, the pre-addiction window when the choices were still being made and the door was still open.

The song is not about the fall itself. It is about the window. The moment when someone you care about is still reachable but moving in a direction that is going to close that window. I wanted to write something aimed at that moment because most songs about addiction are written from inside it or from the recovery side of it. Almost nothing is written for the moment right before.

The lyric is direct. Not preachy, not clinical, but direct in the way that a conversation you care about being direct is. Look in the mirror. Turn yourself around before it is too late. Nothing good comes from this road.

I have had people come up to me after shows and tell me that song was about their brother. Their college roommate. Themselves, from a version of their life that they had moved on from. That is the whole reason I wrote it. Not to make a point about addiction. To reach the person standing at the edge of a decision they cannot take back and say: I see you there. You still have time.

If you know someone standing in that window right now and you do not know how to say the thing, send them this song. You do not have to explain. Let the music say it.

MATCHBOX TWENTY — UNWELL

Unwell is about mental health more than addiction specifically but the two are so frequently intertwined in lived experience that leaving it off this list would be dishonest. Rob Thomas wrote this song about his own struggles in a way that was direct enough to be recognized by the people who needed to recognize it and indirect enough to be played on mainstream radio in 2002. The fact that it crossed that gap, that it was both a hit and a genuine communication to people in a specific kind of pain, is one of the more remarkable achievements in the pop rock canon of that era.

EVERCLEAR — FATHER OF MINE

Art Alexakis of Everclear grew up with a father whose addiction shaped his entire childhood. Father of Mine is the song that came from that. It is raw in a way that some of Everclear's more produced records are not, and the directness of the wound it describes gives it a staying power that their more polished work does not always match. This is a song about the downstream consequences of addiction, the children who carry what their parents could not put down. It belongs on this list because the conversation about addiction is incomplete without the people who grew up inside someone else's.

THE GASLIGHT ANTHEM — HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU KID

The Gaslight Anthem write about struggle and perseverance and the working-class American experience in a way that owes a clear debt to Springsteen but has its own voice. Here's Looking at You Kid is a song about the kind of love that survives difficulty, that holds on through the hard version of someone, that believes in a person's capacity to come back from whatever they have been through. I include it as the counter-weight to the other songs on this list. Not every song about addiction is about the darkness of it. Some of the best ones are about the people who wait on the other side of it.

WHY THIS MUSIC MATTERS

I want to close with something that is not about any specific song.

The songs on this list exist because the people who wrote them needed to say something they could not say any other way. Layne Staley lived what he wrote about on Dirt. Johnny Cash looked back at a lifetime and put what he saw into Hurt. Art Alexakis carried Father of Mine for decades before he had the distance to write it.

The value of these songs is not in how well they describe addiction as a clinical phenomenon. It is in the specific, felt, interior truth of what they communicate. That truth reaches people in a way that clinical language does not and cannot.

If you are living inside any of the experiences these songs describe, whether your own or someone else's, I hope the list gives you something. Not answers. There are no easy answers in any of this. But the recognition that someone else has been here, has looked directly at it, and found words for it. That recognition is what music at its best provides.

You are not alone in this. These songs are proof of that.

Tony Oso

Stream Tony Oso including Going Down at tonyosomusic.com/music

If this post reached you at the right moment, subscribe at tonyosomusic.com. And if you know someone who needs Going Down right now, send it to them. That is what it was written for.
 

Most people told me to pick one. Here is why I never did and what carrying both has taught me about creativity, discipline, and what music is actually for.

At some point in my life, on more than one occasion, someone told me I needed to pick one.

Engineering or music. The practical path or the creative one. The career with a clear trajectory and a defined market or the one with no guarantees and a famously unfavorable economics. The version of my life that made sense on paper or the one that made sense to me.

I never picked one. I am still not picking one. And I want to tell you why, not as a motivational argument for following your passion, but as an honest account of what carrying both actually looks like and what it has taught me about both.

THE ASSUMPTION UNDERNEATH THE ADVICE

When people tell you to pick one they are usually operating from a reasonable assumption that they have not examined carefully enough.

The assumption is that creative work and technical work compete for the same internal resource. That the same capacity for focus and depth and energy that goes into engineering cannot simultaneously go into music. That you cannot do both at a high level because doing either at a high level requires everything you have.

There is truth in that assumption. There are real constraints. Time is finite. Attention is finite. The version of music I would make if I had no other professional demands on my time would be different in some ways from the version I make while also maintaining an engineering career. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What the assumption misses is that the two disciplines do not draw from identical wells. They draw from different places in the same person and they replenish each other in ways that make the total output of both larger than it would be if I had committed to only one.

Let me be specific about how.

WHAT ENGINEERING GIVES MUSIC

The most obvious thing engineering gives my music is the technical knowledge I have written about elsewhere on this blog. Understanding signal flow, acoustic physics, electrical noise, harmonic distortion, and the behavior of audio equipment at a component level gives me an advantage in my home studio and in my understanding of what gear actually does versus what marketing says it does.

But that is the surface version of the contribution.

The deeper version is that engineering trained me to think in systems. To ask not just what is happening but why it is happening and what would have to be true for a different outcome to be possible. That kind of thinking applied to songwriting means I approach a song the way I approach a design problem. What is the system trying to do? What is the signal I am trying to transmit? Where is the noise entering? What is the most direct path between the input, which is the emotion or the experience I am working from, and the output, which is what the listener feels when they hear it?

Engineering also gave me a relationship with failure that music alone might not have. In engineering you build something, it does not work, you find out why, you fix it, you test again. The iteration is built into the process and the failure is information rather than verdict. I brought that framework into songwriting and it changed how I relate to a song that is not working. Instead of taking it personally I ask what is wrong with the system. Then I fix the system.

WHAT MUSIC GIVES ENGINEERING

This direction of the exchange is less discussed and I think more important.

Engineering is a discipline that rewards precision, repeatability, and the elimination of ambiguity. Those are genuine virtues in a technical context. They are also, if they become your only mode of engaging with problems, a significant limitation.

The most interesting engineering problems are the ones that do not have a clean analytical solution. Where the constraints are ambiguous, where the requirements are not fully specified, where what you are building is not yet well defined enough to optimize. Those problems require a different kind of thinking, one that can tolerate uncertainty, generate possibilities without immediately evaluating them, and hold multiple incompatible framings simultaneously until one of them reveals itself as most productive.

Music trained that capacity in me. Writing a song requires you to work in a space where the destination is not known in advance. You are not solving for a specified output. You are discovering what the output should be through the process of trying to create it. That is a fundamentally different cognitive mode from engineering problem-solving and it is one that transfers directly to the ambiguous, open-ended engineering challenges that the purely analytical approach struggles with.

I am a better engineer because I make music. I believe that without qualification. The creative flexibility, the tolerance for ambiguity, the willingness to try something that might not work and learn from it, all of that came from and is maintained by the music.

THE PRACTICAL REALITY OF CARRYING BOTH

I want to be honest about what this actually looks like in practice because the theoretical case for doing both is easier to make than the daily reality is to live.

Time is the primary constraint and there is no version of this that does not require making specific choices about how time is allocated. I protect music time the way other people protect workout time or family time. It is not what happens with the leftover hours after everything else is done. It is scheduled, defended, and treated as a professional commitment rather than a hobby that gets attention when circumstances allow.

This means saying no to things. Social commitments that feel optional. The extra project at work that is interesting but not essential. The version of my evenings that would be spent passively consuming rather than actively creating. None of those choices are comfortable all the time. They are consistently necessary.

It also means being honest with yourself about the difference between rest and avoidance. Rest is necessary. Both disciplines require it and the creative work in particular benefits from periods of deliberate disengagement. Avoidance is when the rest becomes a reason not to do the work that is actually possible to do. The line between them requires regular examination.

The scheduling reality in my life looks like this. Engineering work happens in the hours that belong to it. Music work, recording, writing, practicing, performing, working on the blog, managing the business side of the Tony Oso brand, happens in the hours I have specifically protected for it. Neither bleeds into the other's time if I can prevent it because the cognitive mode required by each is different enough that the bleed is inefficient for both.

There are weeks where this holds cleanly and weeks where it does not. The goal is not perfection. The goal is a consistent enough structure that both disciplines get real attention over time rather than one consistently cannibalizing the other.

THE IDENTITY QUESTION

There is a version of this conversation that is really about identity. About what you call yourself when someone asks what you do. About whether being both things makes you neither thing fully.

I have stopped finding that question interesting.

What I am is what I do. I do engineering and I do music and I have done both long enough and seriously enough that neither is a hobby or an aspiration. Both are real. Both produce work that exists in the world and that I am accountable for. The label question is a distraction from the work question, which is whether both are being done at the level they deserve.

I think the pressure to identify as one thing or the other comes partly from how professional identity works in our culture, the résumé logic that says you are most legible when you are most specialized, and partly from the discomfort other people feel when someone does not fit a familiar category. The engineer-musician is not a common archetype. It makes some people uncertain about how to relate to you. That uncertainty is their problem to manage, not yours.

What you are is the sum of what you do seriously over time. Do both seriously. Over time.

WHY I WOULD NOT CHANGE IT

The music I make is shaped by everything the engineering career gave me. The technical precision, the systems thinking, the failure tolerance, the understanding of physical acoustics. Those things are in the recordings and in the way I approach a live show and in the way I think about the business of being an independent artist.

The engineering work I do is shaped by everything the music gave me. The creative flexibility, the ambiguity tolerance, the ability to work toward an undefined destination and trust the process of getting there.

Each discipline is better because the other exists. That is not a trade-off. It is a compounding return on a decision that most people would have resolved by picking one.

I did not pick one. The music is better for it. The engineering is better for it. And the version of myself that carries both is more complete than either half would be on its own.

That is the only argument I need.

Tony Oso

Stream Tony Oso at tonyosomusic.com/music

Subscribe at tonyosomusic.com to stay connected. If you are trying to figure out how to carry more than one serious thing at a time, I will keep writing about what that actually looks like.

No label. No manager. No budget. Here is what actually built the Tony Oso audience and what I would do differently if I started over.

I want to be honest with you from the start of this post.

Building an audience as an independent musician in 2026 is harder than it was ten years ago in some ways and easier in others. It is harder because the volume of content competing for attention has grown beyond anything that existed a decade ago. It is easier because the tools available to an independent artist for reaching people directly, without a label, without a publicist, without a marketing budget, are more powerful than they have ever been.

What has not changed is this: there is no shortcut. Every independent artist who has built a real, loyal audience has done it through some combination of consistent output, genuine human connection, and patience that most people underestimate when they start.

Here is what has actually worked for me building the Tony Oso audience and what I understand now that I wish I had understood earlier.

LIVE PERFORMANCE IS STILL THE FOUNDATION

Everything else on this list is real and worth doing. None of it replaces playing live consistently and playing live well.

Live performance is the only music marketing tool that puts you in the same room as a person and gives you the opportunity to convert a stranger into someone who will remember you for the rest of their life. A stream on Spotify can be ignored. An algorithm can skip past you. A person standing ten feet away from you while you play a song that hits them in a place they did not expect is not ignoring you. They are going to remember that song and who played it.

I play 4-hour shows. The length is part of the strategy. An artist who plays forty-five minutes and leaves has one interaction with the room. An artist who plays four hours has dozens of interactions, including the ones in hour three when the guards are down and something genuine passes between the stage and the people listening. Those interactions build a different kind of loyalty than a short set followed by a merch table conversation.

Play every show like it is the important one because you do not know which one is. The person in the room who will tell fifty people about you after the show is not wearing a sign. They might be the person who almost did not come. Show up fully every time.

Play locally more than you want to. The temptation when you are building an audience is to reach for the bigger market, the bigger city, the bigger venue. The reality is that a local fanbase that is genuinely loyal, that shows up, that tells their friends, that feels ownership over their discovery of you, is worth more than a thin spread of casual awareness across a wide geography. Build deep before you build wide.

INVEST IN YOUR LOCAL SCENE BEFORE YOU ASK IT TO INVEST IN YOU

This is the piece of advice I see given least often and followed least often, which is probably related.

The musicians who build the strongest local audiences are almost never the ones who show up, play their set, and leave. They are the ones who go to other people's shows. Who share the bill with other local artists and talk to their fans. Who write about the local scene, name other artists publicly, and build the kind of community reciprocity that means when you have a show, the other artists in the scene are telling their audiences about it.

I wrote a post on this blog about the best independent rock artists from Florida. I named real bands I genuinely respect: Rohna, Treis and Friends, Cannibal Kids, Twin Suns, Lady Heroine, Quail Hollow. Every one of those bands has an audience. When they see themselves mentioned by name in a piece of genuine content, most of them share it. Their audiences see it. Some percentage of those people check out Tony Oso for the first time.

That is not a transaction. It is community building. The distinction matters because community building compounds and transactions do not.

YOUR BLOG IS A LONG-TERM TRAFFIC ASSET THAT MOST MUSICIANS IGNORE

Streaming platforms are rented land. Social media platforms change their algorithms and your reach changes with them. Your blog on your own website is land you own, and the content you put on it accumulates value over time rather than depreciating the moment the algorithm changes.

Search engine optimization is not glamorous. Writing a detailed, genuinely useful post about telecaster versus les paul tone or how tube amplifiers work or what playing four-hour sets teaches you about live performance does not feel like music promotion. It feels like writing a blog post. But that blog post, if it is genuinely useful and well-written, will bring new people to your website from search engines for years. They arrive already interested in the topic you wrote about. If your music is embedded in that content, some percentage of them become listeners.

The long game on a music blog is real. Most musicians do not play it because the payoff is not immediate. The ones who do play it find themselves two or three years in with a consistent source of new visitors who convert to fans at a higher rate than social media followers because they arrived through genuine interest rather than algorithmic exposure.

Write about what you actually know. Write about your instruments, your recording process, your influences, your songwriting, your live performance experience, the local scene you are part of. Write things that are genuinely useful to the person reading them. Do not write press releases disguised as blog posts. People can feel the difference and they will leave.

BUILD AN EMAIL LIST BEFORE YOU NEED ONE

Social media followers are not your audience. They are the platform's audience that you have temporary access to. The platform can change its algorithm, suspend your account, change its terms, or cease to exist, and your connection to those people evaporates.

An email list is yours. The people on it have given you direct permission to reach them. When you release a new song, announce a show, share something you have written, or ask for support, you can reach them without paying for access and without hoping an algorithm decides your content is worth showing.

Start building the list before you feel like you have enough of an audience to justify it. The right time to start was the day you began performing publicly. The second best time is now.

Make it easy to subscribe. Put the signup on your website, in your blog posts, in your social profiles. Give people a reason to subscribe beyond generic newsletter language. What will they get from being on your list that they cannot get elsewhere? Early access to new music. Show announcements before they go public. Personal updates that do not live on social media. Whatever the reason, make it specific and make it true.

Email a real newsletter on a real schedule. Not daily. Not necessarily weekly. But consistently enough that your list stays warm and the people on it feel like they have a genuine connection to what you are doing. One email a month that is worth reading is better than four emails a month that are not.

STREAMING IS NOT YOUR MARKETING. IT IS YOUR DISTRIBUTION.

This reframe changed how I think about platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.

Most independent artists treat streaming platforms as marketing channels. They pitch playlists, track their streams, adjust their release strategy based on algorithmic behavior, and measure their success by stream counts. All of that is understandable and some of it is useful. But it is based on a misunderstanding of what streaming platforms actually are.

Streaming platforms are distribution. They get your music to anyone who wants to hear it, anywhere in the world, at essentially zero marginal cost. That is genuinely valuable and you should absolutely be on them.

But they are not designed to build the kind of deep fan relationship that sustains an independent music career. The economics do not support it. The average stream pays a fraction of a cent. An artist needs millions of streams per year to earn a modest income from streaming alone, which means streaming as a primary revenue strategy works for a vanishingly small percentage of independent musicians.

Use streaming as distribution. Use everything else, live performance, your blog, your email list, sync licensing, direct music sales, merchandise, your local scene presence, as the actual marketing. The goal of marketing is to bring people to the music. The goal of streaming is to make the music available when they get there.

SELL YOUR MUSIC DIRECTLY WHENEVER POSSIBLE

Bandcamp and similar direct-to-fan platforms allow you to sell music directly to listeners with a significantly better revenue split than streaming or traditional retail. A listener who buys your album on Bandcamp sends you more money than a listener who streams it ten thousand times.

More importantly, a listener who buys your music directly has made a different kind of commitment than a listener who adds it to a playlist. They have exchanged money for your work. That exchange creates a different relationship with the music and with you as an artist. They are more likely to come to your shows, more likely to tell people about you, more likely to buy the next thing you release.

Make it easy to buy. Have your music available for direct purchase on your website. Have physical copies available at your shows. If someone tells you they love your music, give them a way to support it that goes beyond a stream.

THE REAL TIMELINE

I want to be honest about what building a real fanbase actually takes in terms of time because most of the content on this subject significantly underestimates it.

For most independent artists without a viral moment or a major label push, building an audience that is genuinely loyal, that generates consistent show attendance and music sales, takes three to five years of consistent work. Not three to five years of trying things and waiting. Three to five years of playing regularly, releasing music consistently, writing and creating content, showing up to other people's shows, building the email list, pursuing sync licensing, making the blog work, doing all of it at the same time.

That timeline is discouraging to people who want a faster answer. It is also honest. The artists who make it as independents are almost never the ones who found a shortcut. They are the ones who were still doing the work when the people who wanted a shortcut had already stopped.

The work is not glamorous most of the time. It is playing a show on a Tuesday for a smaller crowd than you hoped and playing it like the room is full anyway. It is writing a blog post about tube amplifiers at 11pm because you know it will bring someone new to your music six months from now. It is emailing your list with something genuine when you do not feel like you have anything interesting to say and finding out that you did.

You do not build a fanbase. You build a practice of showing up, and the fanbase is what accumulates around the practice over time.

I am still building. The practice is the thing I know how to trust.

Tony Oso

Stream Tony Oso at tonyosomusic.com/music

If you are an independent musician trying to figure this out, subscribe at tonyosomusic.com. I will keep writing about what is actually working and what is not. 

As an independent artist who records, mixes, and produces my own music, I’ve had to wear many hats—one of the biggest being the role of an audio engineer. If you’re like me and you’re wondering, how much does an audio engineer make?—you’re not alone. I asked the same question before diving headfirst into recording and production. Here’s what I’ve learned from experience and research.

Understanding the Role of an Audio Engineer

Before we talk numbers, let’s break down what an audio engineer actually does. Audio engineers are responsible for capturing, editing, mixing, and mastering sound. Whether it’s in a recording studio, live venue, film set, or podcast booth, they make sure the sound is clean, balanced, and professional. I’ve spent hours behind the DAW (digital audio workstation), adjusting EQs, setting compression levels, and layering effects—just to get one track sounding right.

So… How Much Does an Audio Engineer Make?

The answer depends on experience, location, and niche. According to recent industry data, here’s a breakdown:

• Entry-Level Audio Engineers: Around $30,000 to $45,000 per year
• Mid-Level Engineers: Typically $50,000 to $70,000 annually
• Top-Tier or Freelance Engineers: Can earn $80,000+, with some hitting six figures if they have major credits or consistent freelance clients

I’ve met engineers working in major cities like LA or New York who charge $75 to $150 an hour for studio work. Some freelancers earn more by mixing remotely, offering online mastering, or building a solid brand through social media and referrals.

My Journey and Side of the Industry

Personally, I’ve saved thousands by learning the skills myself. But it’s taken years of trial and error, investing in plugins, gear, and education. If I were charging for the hours I spend engineering my own tracks, I’d be billing like a mid-level pro by now!

The beauty of being both a musician and an audio engineer is the creative control—I don’t have to explain my vision to someone else. But I also understand why many artists hire engineers. If you’re building a career as an audio engineer, you have options: work at a studio, freelance, or start your own setup like I did.

Additional Income Streams for Audio Engineers

Many audio engineers diversify their income. Here are a few common sources:

• Mixing & Mastering for clients
• Live sound engineering
• Teaching or creating courses
• Selling presets or sample packs
• Music licensing and sync work

The more value you provide, the more you can earn. And the best part? Your skill compounds over time. The more you mix, the better you get—and the more you can charge.

Final Thoughts: Is Audio Engineering a Viable Career?

If you’re passionate about sound and willing to put in the hours, absolutely. The question how much does an audio engineer make depends as much on hustle and skill as it does on formal education. For me, it’s been part of my growth as an artist—and a way to stay fully connected to my sound.

Whether you’re looking to go full-time, freelance, or just improve your home recordings, learning audio engineering is worth every second.