Most people who love an artist have no idea what their listening is worth to them. Not because they don’t care — because the number is abstract and nobody has ever shown it to them.
What I built
A client-side calculator on this site that turns a price into a stream count:
- Enter what an album, ticket, or piece of merch costs
- Adjust the per-stream rate assumption, because the real one is a moving target nobody publishes honestly
- See the equivalent number of plays — and where the annual threshold sits, below which a track is demonetized entirely and earns exactly zero
Why it exists
I have been releasing music through the whole arc: torrenting, when there was no expectation of money at all, then streaming, which replaced no expectation with a rounding error. Direct support — Bandcamp, a self-hosted catalog, membership, buying the thing — is not nostalgia. It is the difference between three figures and three digits after the decimal.
The calculator makes that argument without me having to make it. It’s a number, on a page, that anyone can check.
Stack
An Astro component with the calculation logic factored into @steventrueba/shared so the math is testable and reusable — the same numbers power writing and conversations elsewhere.