Veteran Cosmic Rockers – Our Playlist on Spotify
We are all Veteran Cosmic Rockers. At least those of us that have at least 5+ decades under our belt, and are still passionate about the music. The music that was created and was given flight in the 60s, 70s, and 80s defined us. It energized us. It became the soundtrack of our lives, and has continued to fulfill us to this day.
When I was toying with the concept of creating Procyon Music, I found one irrefutable fact that convinced me that it is now (once again) a good time to try to share my music with the world. I encountered this in the statistics that I discovered while researching Spotify. The stat that really amazed me, and convinced me that “Now is the Time”, is:
There are 37 Million Listeners on Spotify over 55 years old.
That’s incredibly energizing to me. What it means is that our passion about the music of our time thrives still, and the rockers that were teens and young adults in the 70s and 80s, are now still faithfully consuming and streaming our musical themes. Not Fade Away!
We have preserved this passion for the music through many transitions of media; from 45s to full album vinyls, to 8 Track tapes, and then Cassette tapes. Then we made the jump to the Digital Era with CDs, and in the 90s, the MP3 digital format was created, and everything took off. The landmark music site MP3.Com was the first real music sharing site, and for a while, there was a new outlet for artists to share our music with the world.
I had a great time with my music during this time, with several of my songs (and my friends’ music) breaking into the top 10 in the progressive rock charts. It was actually getting heard by a large group of listeners – the validation and satisfaction was utterly delicious. That was until MP3.Com was shut down for copyright infringement.
Then Apple created iTunes, and the world was downloading music, replacing their albums and cassettes with bulging folders of music files. This transition of technology was pervasive; I remember my 75 year old father collecting smooth jazz MP3s and playing them on his Macintosh desktop with iTunes.
I remember one night while out looking at the stars and listening to my favorite background space music, my friend Martin told me I should replace all my cassettes with MP3s. “MP-whats?” I asked. Little did I know my musical world was about to change again. Martin was always very forward-thinking! So I started ripping all my CDs and saving the song files to my hard drive. Hundreds of them. And we’ve been plodding along that way for 25 years.
Now the musical landscape has evolved once again, with Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Pandora spinning up paid streaming services. With Spotify Premium, for $9.99 a month (July 2019), you can have unlimited access to tens of millions of songs, on demand. Talk about instant gratification! What do I do with all the bulging folders of MP3s? I still have them, just like all my old cassette cases from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
With this change, everything has morphed again. Downloading of music is slowing, and most everyone who enjoys music is starting to migrate to the streaming platforms. This has completely eliminated the problem of music piracy. Artists are now paid royalties based on the counts of people streaming their songs.
Which brings me back to Spotify, who is now embracing and supporting independent artists by allowing submission of their singles and albums into the platform, and providing tools and training for artists to show them how to upload and market their music. This new platform allows undiscovered artists to be able to re-release their music. And until we are found by the streaming world, we can treat our back catalogs as evergreen; it is ready to be newly discovered, just like the day it was written. And there are 37 million Veteran Cosmic Rockers out there waiting to hear it.
Since Spotify paid members get unconstrained access to any music to which they might want to listen, the huge barrier of purchase has effectively been removed. All we need to do as artists is to encourage the listener to just tap or click on our song, which is then immediately streamed. At this point royalties flow. Miniscule royalties. Microscopic. But as numbers of streams increase, the revenue can start to be seen. It’s a lot of work to grow awareness of our music. But at least now our future can be in our own hands and our music can be listened to, appreciated, and might even have an impact on people.
I am trying not to get my hopes up too far, but Spotify feels like a new MP3.Com to me. It feels like a new opportunity for indy artists to have a voice and actually be heard by the masses again. It’s something I’ve been waiting for, for quite a long time. About 20 years, in fact, since MP3.com closed its digital doors.
The new method of music discovery is the playlist; a curated list of music that any Spotify user can create and share. So in my artist profile on Spotify (“Orion Syndrome“), I have created and shared a new playlist called “Veteran Cosmic Rockers“. The name is taken from a song from the 80’s by the Moody Blues, off their Long Distance Voyager album.
It came to me in a brainstorm that this is an excellent moniker to take as our own; the holdouts from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s – the rock veterans still holding true, through all the music evolution and revolution.
In Spotify playlists, it is also possible to include our own music that fits well within the ranks of the Greats. For me the Greats are Pink Floyd, Rush, The Moody Blues, Pete Townshend & The Who, Genesis, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and many others. It makes sense that since these giants were my inspirations and influences, my music will mingle well, having the same moods and styles.
That is what I have done with the Veteran Cosmic Rocker playlist. If you are one of the 37 million Veteran Cosmic Rockers on Spotify, I invite you to “follow” the playlist to enjoy our curated music of the Greats, and also follow me and the other Procyon Music artists on Spotify. The whole point of all this (my “why”) is having our music be heard, enjoyed, and being as impactful as possible.
I believe it is now time to make a stand – I think an exciting future awaits us as independent artists in the Streaming Era.