A Number Without a Denominator

Zanias posted a video in November about a single number: the monthly listeners figure on a Spotify artist page. Her verdict, unvarnished — it is

a garbage metric for deciding which artists have value

and she is right about the damage. She has watched festival lineups get built off it. Anyone who has released a record has watched their own sense of worth move with it.

But I want to take the argument somewhere slightly different, because "garbage metric" lets the number off too easily. The number is fine. It is the reading that is broken.

What it actually counts

Monthly listeners counts how many individual accounts played at least one track in the last thirty days. That is the whole definition.

So the person who found you, played the album end to end, bought the record and came to the show counts as one. And the person who put on a playlist, walked away, had one of your tracks go by while they were cooking, counts as one. Same weight. The metric cannot tell those two apart, because it was never built to.

That is not a flaw. A reach figure is supposed to measure reach. The flaw is what happens next.

One number is never data

Here is the thing that gets skipped in every argument about metrics. A number on its own carries no information about the world. It only starts meaning something when you put it next to another number.

Fifty thousand monthly listeners next to five hundred followers is a story about a playlist. Somebody was exposed to you; almost nobody chose you.

The same fifty thousand next to thirty thousand followers and a few hundred direct sales is a completely different story. That is an audience.

Same figure. Opposite realities. And an industry that reads the first number and skips the second is not measuring badly — it is not measuring at all.

Zanias' own case is the cleanest demonstration I have seen. Her monthly listeners barely moved when she released an album she considers her best work. Meanwhile her Bandcamp sales hit their highest in years, with names on the orders she had never seen before. Two numbers pointing in opposite directions at the same moment — and only one of them describes people who decided anything.

Her inflated figure, she points out, is largely propped up by "Synapse," a track from the 2012 Linea Aspera debut on Dark Entries. A record from fourteen years ago is deciding what a working artist is worth today, and the mechanism doing the deciding is a recommendation system.

Why the machine prefers the unremarkable

This is the part of her argument that should worry people who make things.

A recommender optimises against skips. So it learns to promote music that does not make anyone reach for the button — music that is pleasant, unobtrusive, and close enough to what surrounds it that nobody notices a change of register. It is not selecting for good. It is selecting for frictionless.

Which is a machine reliably rewarding the absence of the thing that makes music worth making. I wrote in anyone can mix that a record has no fixed meaning — that what precedes it decides how it lands. A system optimising for non-interruption is the exact inverse of that instinct. It wants every neighbour to sound like the last one.

A business and an ecosystem

Zanias uses an image I keep coming back to: music as an ecosystem. The underground as taproots, digging for new material and new methods, pulling nutrients up; pop as the leaves everyone actually sees. She says she does not want to call it a business.

Here I'd part company with her slightly, because it is a business. Rent gets paid or it doesn't. Pretending otherwise is a luxury belief, and it is usually held by people who are not relying on the money. Artists deserve to be paid, and "it's about the art" has been used to underpay musicians for as long as there have been musicians.

The two framings are not opposites, though. They describe the same thing at different depths. The further up you go, the more it behaves like a business: volume, margin, predictable product. The further down you go, the more it behaves like an ecosystem: things get made that cannot be justified on a spreadsheet, get passed around, and turn up years later in something that sells. The underground is where the business gets its raw material, and it has never once paid for it directly.

Which means the health of the whole thing depends on the layer with the least money in it. That is a strange arrangement, and it is why "just release it and see what the algorithm does" is worse advice than it sounds.

Where we release, and what it costs

I don't put music on Spotify.

That is not a stance adopted for this article — look at the release pages. The Between Coasts EP sells on Bandcamp and on Subvert. If you want to stream it, that's Tidal, Apple Music or YouTube Music, all of which pay meaningfully more per play. Spotify appears nowhere on this site, and never has.

Bandcamp is still the most direct route: you buy it, the money is mostly the artist's, you own the file. Its one structural weakness is that it has been sold twice in the last few years, and the people using it had no say in either sale.

Subvert is the answer to that specific problem. It launched in 2025 as a co-operative with roughly 22,000 founding owner-members — artists, labels, workers and listeners who actually own the thing, elect its board, and voted to charge no platform fee at all. AI-generated music is not allowed on it. Whether it lasts is an open question. But it cannot be sold out from under the people who built it, which is more than any other platform in this list can say.

And the honest part: this costs reach. Choosing not to be on the largest platform means fewer people hear the record, and my own monthly listeners number is not a number at all. That is the trade. I would rather have four hundred people who bought something than forty thousand accounts that had a track go past them.

So if you book, sign, or programme anyone: don't read that figure on its own. Put it next to their followers. Put it next to whether anybody paid for anything. Or do the thing the number was invented to save you from, and listen to the record.

Source: Zanias, posted 12 November 2025. The quoted line follows that clip. Subvert's fee structure and membership figures are its own published numbers.