Streaming, for example via Spotify, is a very good way for musicians to become known, because such platforms allow you to be discovered nationally and internationally. If you’re lucky, you can land hits via Spotify and the like without record labels having to do a lot of promotion or without you having to go on a long trek with concerts in pubs, clubs and festivals to be discovered. It’s no different in Flanders or Belgium.
At Spotify, you get between 0.0003 and 0.0005 euro cents per stream. For a million streams, that means gross earnings of around €3,400 in Belgium. But, says composer and musician Miguel Wiels, that also means you have to finance everyone involved and all production costs. Wiels knows what he’s talking about, because he wrote the songs for the mega-famous girl band K3 in the Dutch-speaking world: “I wrote around 240 songs for K3, good for 100 million streams on YouTube. But I’ve never seen a single euro for it.”
