The Digital Album and the Divided Life of a Musician
- Arashk Azizi
- Aug 17
- 3 min read
Releasing a Digital Album feels at first like a promise: a chance for an independent musician to reach listeners anywhere in the world. No labels, no gatekeepers—just upload, distribute, and wait for the music to travel. That was the dream the streaming services and digital distributors sold us.
But once you step into that world, another reality surfaces. Yes, your music can reach global ears, but so can everyone else’s. And when every musician has the same promise, the promise begins to break.
Digital Album vs. Concert Hall
As a composer and pianist, I live in two musical worlds. In the concert hall, the audience comes to see passion, risk, and virtuosity. My contemporary works—like the Divine Sonata with more than 50 minutes length—are not easy listening. They avoid conventional harmony and melody, yet in live performance they are received warmly, often with real enthusiasm.
Now compare that to their digital life. In a full year since release, the Divine Sonata had fewer than 100 streams worldwide.
Meanwhile, my Elegy Sonata has four movements, two of them short and soothing—less than three minutes each. Those two pieces alone draw more than a thousand monthly streams. On stage, the monumental sonata captures attention; online, the shorter fragments quietly survive in playlists.
This is not only my story. Many Estonian Composers and musicians I admire face the same paradox. Take violinist Triin Ruubel, an exceptional performer with an international reputation. On Spotify, she has fewer than a thousand monthly listeners—not enough to qualify for payment under Spotify’s rules. The situation is similar across platforms.
The Hidden Layer of the Digital Album
It seems to me the promises of streaming platforms came with an unspoken condition: yes, you can reach the world, but so can everyone else. The cost of visibility shifts back onto the artist.
And even if you succeed—if you somehow gather a thousand fans—those listeners are scattered across continents. They are no help to your concerts, no support for your physical presence.
You could argue that local promotion is possible on digital platforms. It is—but it is also expensive, and it undermines the whole point. If the digital world was supposed to free us from boundaries, why are we spending to target audiences city by city? Why did we go digital at all, if we are forced to return to local thinking, only with more expense and complication?
Instead of worrying about your local audience, you now have to worry about a worldwide one.
Two Kinds of Musicians
Today, I see two kinds of musicians. Some thrive on stage but barely exist online. Others succeed online, with 100k monthly listeners, but have little to offer in the concert hall. Neither side is less valid—they are simply different forms of existence.
As for those of us who want both, the gap is real and hard to cross. Just to be clear I'm not talking about AI musicians or ghost producers using bots to get thousand and thousands of streams. No I'm talking about real musicians who love their work and has been successful on one field—digital or concert—more than the other, much more.
The Division Inside the Artist
This gap is not just external; it cuts into the artist’s own decisions. Should I record another smooth, streaming-friendly track to keep algorithms happy? Or should I compose according to my inner vision, knowing it may be ignored digitally?
The answer might sound obvious, do both. But it takes time and effort and money, and is not always possible to be done for all independent artists who are slowly growing.
The old divide between popular and artistic music has always been there, but the digital world has moved it closer—inside the artist’s own process. In a pre-digital era, I could simply accept that my work wasn’t popular. Today, popularity itself has entered my music, dividing me from within.
Do I wait for inspiration, work long on the best piece I can, and risk being forgotten online? Or do I release quickly, afraid of being marked idle and losing the few thousand monthly listeners I’ve gathered?
This is the dilemma of the Digital Album. It gives us the world, but leaves us divided—between stage and screen, between art and algorithm, and sometimes between ourselves. This is another form of Fakism, one that shows us an opportunity and then with little problems here and there carries us so much away from the original idea that we might even forget where did we start and where did we go wrong.
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