People ask me pretty often why my music isn't on Spotify, or why they can't find it on Apple Music. The short answer is that I chose not to put it there. The longer answer is more interesting, and it's worth walking through, because it's not the reason most people assume.
The Mall, Not Your House
When someone lands on Spotify or Apple Music, they're not really in my house. They're in a mall, and the mall owner's entire business model is keeping them wandering past other stores. The moment a song ends, an algorithm is already nudging the listener toward something else, often something that sounds similar enough to keep them scrolling, but different enough that they forget who they just heard. You don't build a relationship with a listener there. You rent their attention for two or three minutes before the platform sells it to the next act in line.
Apple Music runs the same mall with slightly nicer lighting. Its autoplay and "up next" queue works exactly the same way, engineered to keep you inside Apple's ecosystem rather than let a moment with one artist breathe. Apple leans a bit more on human-curated editorial playlists instead of pure algorithm, but that just swaps algorithmic gatekeeping for human gatekeeping. Either way, a small independent act needs a lot of luck, or an inside connection, to ever surface naturally.
It's Not Really About the Money
People assume the reason independent artists resist streaming is the pay, and it's true that streaming pays fractions of a cent per play. But honestly, that's almost beside the point. Even if Spotify paid ten times what it does today, the core problem would still be there: the platform is optimized for its own retention, not for a listener actually getting to know an artist. The tiny payout is just a symptom. The real issue is that you don't own the relationship with the person listening.
The Other Options Cost You Either Way
Here's the part that surprises people. If you decide to skip the big streaming platforms, you might think there's a simple, free, fully independent path elsewhere. There isn't, not really.
Distribution services, the ones that get your music onto Spotify and Apple Music in the first place, often charge a monthly or yearly fee just for the privilege, whether or not a single stranger ever presses play. Some newer "free" distributors exist, but the free tier usually comes with catches, like giving up a cut of secondary royalties, or account suspension fees if you don't log in often enough. Free rarely means free.
Bandcamp doesn't charge a subscription, but it takes a cut of every sale, and it's built for an audience that already knows they want to buy your music. If nobody's discovering you there, you're just paying platform friction for zero reach, the same core problem as everywhere else, just with a gentler price tag.
SoundCloud looks like the closest thing to a real answer, since the hosting itself is genuinely free and gives you some page customization. But it comes with two catches. First, the free tier is ad-supported and caps your audio quality. Second, and more absurdly, a lot of creator content on SoundCloud, including certain tracks and playlist features, ends up gated behind SoundCloud's own paid subscription for the listener. So you end up in a strange spot: you're not making meaningful money, the platform still wants a subscription fee, and now it's charging your own fans just to hit play on a song you wrote.
Once you add all that up, the honest picture is that every third-party option, free or paid, big or small, is optimized for something other than the actual relationship between you and the person listening to your song.
The Trade: Reach for Depth
Hosting music myself means trading reach for depth. Someone who finds my player on my own site isn't there by algorithmic accident. They searched for me, or a friend sent them a link, or they saw me play live and wanted to hear the song again. That's a warmer visitor than someone who got auto-played into a track for fifteen seconds before skipping on. And when the song ends on my site, there's nowhere else to go except deeper into my world: other songs, the story behind them, maybe a link to come see a show.
Keeping Control of the Room
There's also a control piece that matters a lot when you're doing this on your own. On my own site, I decide what plays next. I decide what context surrounds a song, whether that's the story behind it, or a note about where I wrote it, or a link to upcoming shows. No platform, free or paid, gives you that. You become a tiny tile in an infinite grid, indistinguishable from millions of other tiles, or you become a locked door your own fans have to pay to open.
The Short Version, If Someone Asks
If a friend or another musician gives me a sideways look for not being on the big platforms, or for not chasing one of the "free" alternatives, here's what I tell them: every other option out there is either trying to take my listener's attention and sell it to someone else, or trying to charge my own fans just to press play. I'd rather build a smaller, real room, one I control completely, where people who care enough to walk in can actually meet me, no subscription required, no algorithm deciding what they hear next.
That's the whole philosophy behind the player on this page. Thanks for being here.