Musicians are famously, pathologically bad at talking about money. So let's talk about money.

In high school, my thrash metal band scraped together every dollar we had to press 500 CDs. It cost about $1,100. Roughly $2.20 a disc. We weren't the greediest little capitalists, so we sold them for $5. That's $1,400 in profit, which went straight back into the next batch and our first run of t-shirts.

When we signed to the independent label Earache Records, the math scaled up. Before a tour, we'd "buy" our own CDs from the label at about $4 a copy and sell them at shows for $15. That's $11 in our pocket every time a fan walked away with our music in their hands.

For the sake of the math, let's say that a single stream of a song is worth about $0.003. It's not REALLY that but it's...complicated. But close enough.

For that same $11 on Spotify? A fan would have to stream one of our songs around 3,000 times. That's one play every day for over eight years.

And even if it isn't a two-second grindcore track from our old label mates Napalm Death, you're still looking at roughly 150 hours of listening. 

In the product model, it didn't matter whether a fan played the album once or three thousand times.

The transaction was complete the second they bought it. And honestly, I doubt anyone was hitting play that many times to my thrash metal band. People just wanted to hand over $15 and support some kids living out a stupid dream of being on the road.

Now, I'm not going to pretend the old model was clean. Major labels exploited that willingness constantly, bundling twelve shitty filler tracks around the one song you actually wanted.

But the service model took money out of the equation and replaced it with something rarer and harder to fake: time.

And $15 is a lot easier to part with than 150 hours of your life.