Mark O'Connor - O'Connor Method

I’m at a 2026 year high right now of 164,300 monthly listeners on Spotify. But don’t kid yourself, it bites! And there are plenty of great music colleagues who are either not much more than this, lower than this, or their recent releases are not streaming like their own records from 10 or 15 years ago did. Or even from 2 years ago. It is way, way down for these acoustic genres. And the odd thing is, many of the personal Meta pages rank much higher for folks, but the followers never seem to go over and stream the music. I guess all of our promotion selfie videos with camera-in-face that we feel compelled to do, is more than plenty for most folks. No need to check out the real art. In short, you could have a million people follow you, and still stream next to nothing. Ask viral sensation duo Jake & Shelby who evidently just lost their record deal at age 19 or something, but they have a million followers on Meta.

Depending on who the artist is, steams on Spotify represent anywhere from a low of 35% of all streams, all the way up to 80%. So wherever it lands, it means that you can pretty much tell what is happening with that recording, or that artist.

I’ve been following a few key artists in our acoustic genres as of late, and the latest releases are all, like I said, way down. Even from 2 years ago. Maggie’s and my track “Wild Flowers” from our ‘Life After Life’ album 2 years ago is sitting at about 135k Spotify streams. It doesn’t seem like very much. But when you see that Renée Fleming and Béla Fleck’s latest single “Epitaph” is still below 45k after a few months, and her collab with Vince Gill being even lower, you’re going, what? Moving over to young bluegrass star and social media darling Sierra Hull. Her three latest tracks called “Movements” are averaging 15k streams a piece. And then take a look at Charlie Worsham, who had just won his first CMA Award last year with his bluegrass music influenced country. His three latest singles are under 60k.

The Punch Brothers, who are on quite a long tour promoting their recent singles don’t seem to be doing that much better, and they do have a major label deal. The first single now out several months is at about 110k, the 2nd is at 75k, and the new one is still under 50k. Compare that to their track “Julep” from a dozen years ago at 27M! There’s the new bluegrass fiddlin' gal Bronwyn who also sings, and who had streamed singles in the 200k vicinity 2 years ago, enough to give her confidence to leave Molly Tuttle’s Golden Highway band to go it alone for a solo artist career. It must be wild to find that after two full years of nearly daily posting of selfies, her new follow up single from that record two years ago is just around 10k steams, and after a month of being out. And then the whopper, Jake & Shelby. A million followers on Meta, losing their record deal, and all to show for it is that their monthly listenership on Spotify is half of what mine even is. I’ve got 1/10 of their Meta followers. 1/20th. Now they are scrambling to try to get their followers to buy something of theirs to even have a career in music, because they say they can’t afford to tour. So they’re asking their followers to sign up for their newsletter, or follow them to Patreon where can try to monetize the page a little. In short, they cannot monetize their unbelievable viral selfie video output. The vast majority of their followers will never listen to a Jake & Shelby studio track a single time, beyond the selfie excerpt they just posted staring a hole into the iPhone lens.

What’s going on? Well, it is not a sustainable recording career for most of us. What’s next? AI music will just push what little traction we have now, completely out the door, right? Because the record labels sold our music out and threw it under the bus to the big media and big tech (Spotify) to pad these CEO’s pockets to the tune of billions. Following that, us musicians with few places left to go, took to our cell phones, and created “content” just like the new music “consultants” coming out of music business school classrooms insisted we do—because at 24 years old with a masters degree in business in the face of weakened old music execs, of course they knew best. And the result is that each of us gave our music away for free in 30-second chunks so many thousands of times by now, that we finished the devaluation process of recorded music ourselves.

There is Alison Krauss and Union Station’s new album, the queen of the bluegrass genre still, but with her biggest streaming track off the new album at less than 1.5M streams—and after an entire season of touring the country behind it… A little different than the 350M for her “Whiskey Lullaby” from years back. Way, way down.

I had a kick out of watching a selfie talking-video from Stephen Bishop’s wife about how much money they expect to make on his 1970s classic “On and On” from Keith Urban’s new “yacht rock” album. (a favorite song during my high school years. I loved that soft rock stuff like he and James Taylor). She tells us that at 5M Keith Urban streams, their cut will land them in the vicinity tens of thousands of dollars as she described to the selfie cell phone video. At 50M streams they will stand to make hundreds of thousands for their share. And if it streams 100M as they know Keith can and might do! They will walk away with something much closer to a million for Stephen’s classic re-make! She adds, “so songwriters, hold on to your publishing!” A quick look at Keith’s Spotify page gives you what is actually happening – the Spotify streaming number on that track—after more than a month of being out… drum roll… “On and On” is just over 300k streams. The calculator says that will be about $1,800 for the Bishops. I would say, don’t plan on making that down payment on the Yacht based on Keith’s yacht rock track just yet.

Billy Strings is the king of bluegrass, but it’s really hard to be a king-maker in these genres. After years of touring now, one of his band members finally released a solo album, mandolinist, vocalist and songwriter, Jarrod Walker. The album’s been out several months, did a showcase tour to support it while Billy was hobbled up with the broken leg. He ended up streaming an average of 50k streams on Spotify across all tracks. Despite Billy posting on it, endorsing it, playing on it, they could not get a hundred packed arenas full of fans they play for each year, who know Jarrod by his first name, last name, and heck maybe even a middle name to listen to his songs a single time. We experienced something similar. We were Zac Brown’s favorite act at one time—he put us on the opening slot for an hour before each of his summer mega concerts, and even had us return for 20 minutes to play with ZBB themselves during their set, and they loved us so much they covered one of our new tracks with them. But could not get that audience to stream it. We fared a little better getting up to 500k streams on our track Zac featured. But even 500k streams is not going to pay the rent. And that was 7 years ago. Today, we’d likely be at most everybody’s numbers here easily. While the Bishops earn their $1,800 so far. Maybe ours was worth 3 grand to someone, and then it fell off the side-o-the-earth. But just because we streamed a few more times than Walker, meant little. It is like one guy getting 2 cents while the other guy gets 4 cents. It’s still cents. And it does have a scent.

Rehearsing with the great Augustn Hadelich for our concert together featuring a lot of my violin music. We’re performing together at the Lucerne Music Festival this summer. (Photo by Suxiao Yang) Lucerne Festival, Augustin Hadelich
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