10 Year Conclusion.

Time to wrap things up! I've been doing music with commercial focus for 10 years now. Releasing my 45th song in September, "Vem Kan Segla", a traditional Finnish-Swedish folk song from Åland made as an mysterious ambient instrumental. Goal was to make 2 original songs/year + non-commercial remixes, the avarage ends up 4,5 songs/year + remixes so that's more than double the goal.

It went from hobby -> commercial & and now back to hobby again. Learned a lot both making my own music but also producing for other artists. What I can tell you 10 years later is that I've had ideas/illusions about this industry that has been proven wrong.

Out of all the creative industries I've been fooling around with, music is probably the most difficult to make it in (as in make any kind of decent living).

"If you got talent AND work hard you'll make it" can be applied to other creative industries, but not music. The competition is absurd, I've been working with world-class singers that is also working with world-famous producers that everyone knows about (as in living legends type of people, BIG names) but these singers still just have a few hundred K listeners/month on Spotify at best, also consider revenue likely is shared with a bunch of other people like producers, writers, the publisher etc. So even if you have +1M monthly streams you may still actually not be able to make a living on it.

Another example I found was a singer with very unique cinematic/epic voice. She was singing in a commercial on youtube with +30M views so one would think she had been discovered - nope. Completely unknown, despite very high output of new music & being active on various hire-me platforms, she had like 20 plays/month on Spotify. I was like... how is this even possible!? THIS amount of talent, THIS type of unique epic voice, THIS amount of hard work/output of new music... HOW can she still be completely unknown?

The answer is annoyingly simple; the market is so saturated that even if you have talent, there is a high degree of randomness/chance at play. You can spend a lifetime making music, have talent & work hard, but you might still never actually be able to make a living on it.

Also consider now that AI is making BETTER music than most humans are capable off - I don't even contemplate it, I just accept it as a fact. A lot of people tend to fight back though; this is a very human reaction, but not very productive.

And this is why I leave the commercial phase behind and return to being a hobbyist. Of course I will still release music on commercial platforms like Spotify, but it is 100% for fun, no effort or attempts to make a living on it.

I've achieved my goal +2x in terms of output & a decent amount of streams through the years. Also got the chance to work with wonderful aspiring artists helping them with their creative vision & produce/mix songs with them, this has been a great honor and I'm humbled to see how hard some work to try and make it in this industry. We're all in the same boat, and getting to work with other talented people is a gift.

Follow your dreams, and realize you can choose your game, but it's difficult to change the rules of the game; and the game is changing over time, sometimes dramatically (as now in the case with AI, or when physical media got taken over by streaming).

Fun fact: One of the songs I'm most happy with is my very first commercial release from january 2015, "Life", check it out, just did a re-upload on youtube @ollermusic :)

Stay creative, love what you do, and bang your head against the wall if you need to, but also have the integrity to move on and do what feels right for you.