This man releases a new album on Spotify every single day – here’s how much money he makes
“Writing songs every day has become a fun routine,” says Michiru Aoyama.
Image: Esther Moreno / Alamy Stock Photo
The idea of recording an album a day might send the average person running for the hills, but for ambient artist Michiru Aoyama, the routine has been a part of his everyday life for the last two years.
The key, Aoyama says in a new Guardian feature, is having a rigorous routine that he dedicates himself to.
Each morning, the man wakes up at 5am, watches “a whole digest” of European football for 30 minutes, and then composes music from about 6am to midday. After which he goes on a two-hour walk, eats a meal, and then resumes composing again until 7pm, when he uploads the day’s work – which itself is a two-hour job.
“After that, I study a little,” says Aoyama, who goes to bed at around 11pm.
As for his creative process, the artist shares that he adopts a tried and true “compositional mould”, where his PRS McCarty guitar or Prophet-10 analog synth is run through an FX bank to create his own brand of ambient tunes.
For Aoyama, “Writing a song is like keeping a diary… I disclose all the good memories and bad memories, and writing songs every day has become a fun routine.”
“It is a trial and error process, but I release it all, the good sound quality and the bad sound quality without any concealment,” he adds. An approach that’s mostly certainly controversial, but not without reward, for the musician estimates that around 90% of his income is derived from the many Spotify playlists that feature his music. The rest, Aoyama says, comes from Bandcamp.
At present, the musician has more than 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and earns a total income of about £2,400 a month. In April this year, Aoyama “retired” from his role at the tech investment firm SoftBank, where he served as an event organiser and employee trainer.
Asked what he would do if he stopped writing someday, Aoyama replies: “For me, writing songs is like brushing my teeth. So I would not feel comfortable stopping.” When pressed, the man says: “I would take pictures, draw pictures, or write novels. But what I would most like to do is to make movies.”
