1isle - Music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.

 What is 1isle?

Back in early 2020, pre-pandemic and all of that, I had been making music with one of my close friends for several years, and we got curious about what it really takes to put music on Spotify.

We found out that if you're willing to let a distributor take a cut of the profit, you can even upload for free. Otherwise, you can also find a distributor where you pay a $20 fee and they take no cut of the profit. Given that we expected to make basically no money off of this, we chose the free route. 

We started assembling songs, making album art, artist icons, social media accounts, and so much more. We chose our name a little randomly, we were playing around with a band name generator, and one of the generated names got messed up. They weren't supposed to include numbers or special characters. Thinking that was kind of funny, we stuck with it. Also it sounded kinda cool to us at the time. 

Making the Music

The two of us had been making music for years and years. At least since 2017 we had been making music together, but before then each of us had been doing music stuff for a while. We didn't make music as a band the traditional way, where you just tackle one song at a time, one instrument played by each person, etc. We instead would both get out our computers, make separate songs, and then get feedback, advice, often MIDI and audio files from each other to add to our individual songs. By the time we were done, songs that had originally been made by one person wound up being unique group projects.

We would even do challenges, where we'd both start on the same single audio file, and within an hour, make a song that somehow was based around that one sound. It was amazing how even the exact same starting point could lead to such different outcomes. Fun fact, there's at least 2 songs we've released featuring the exact same solo, chopped up and edited differently. 

Our challenges weren't limited to just the two of us as well, at least 2 or 3 other friends would join us for different ones. They were quite casual, just seeing where we could go with audio editing, rather than a real competition. It was really good fun.

The Results

We made like thirty bucks over 4 years. If you're planning on a career in music, this is so totally the wrong post to be reading. That doesn't even cover one Reason license, much less all the music gear we bought over the years; pocket operators, op-z, maschine, komplete kontrol, etc. etc. Spotify pays just nothing, and most of the other platforms went unused. Our music is even on TikTok, but I think the only time I saw that get used was when someone tagged the wrong song when uploading a video. 

But I learned so much from this. It's so much better to be casual about music. Make a goofy song just because you can. We wound up making a song using only sounds recorded from the GoPro Karma drone I used to own, including the text to speech voice from the controller. It's hidden somewhere on one of our abandoned soundcloud accounts, no idea where. 

I'm not as proud of the music anymore as I used to be, but I'm still glad I did it. I'm glad it's online so I can look back on it. I still make music in my free time sometimes, and I've got a few songs in the to-be-uploaded-to-spotify folder in my google drive, but who knows if that will ever happen. 

Listen to the Music

Spotify link can be found here. Each listen gives us $0.00255 to split between 2 people after our cut to our distributor lol