I too choose this guy's dead wife.

Look up an old newspaper from say 100-120 years ago and check out the obituaries.

I have an XBox 360 controller lying around that still works great. I have a couple DS4s that still work great even though the rubber started coming off the analog sticks. The one Dualsense I bought crapped out after a single year of moderate use.

The best I can figure is that the 4M$20 track was popular on a streaming service that pays better, and vice versa for whatever reason.

That's more than $45!

I got free beer at a show once 20+ years ago, too.

I pay Distrokid ~$20 a year to distribute my music to a lot of streaming services, but I do not pay individual streaming services. I never really expected much return. I wasn't disappointed! Haha!

Maybe some kind of increasing scale for revenue depending on larger numbers of listens.

My break down by track is pretty inconsistent, too. I've got a single track with over a million listen that made me 36 cents. My most popular track has over 4M listens, and it's responsible for half that $45. Distrokid doesn't say which streaming service that revenue comes from, either. Some pay more than others, I imagine.

I have to wonder about the logistics. He can't be running them on his own single Internet connection. Or could VPNs handle it so it would appear his listens are coming from all over the world? $10M is a lot of money. How long did it take to amass that?

Me? Honestly, I think it would be obvious to any discerning listener what music is actually made by a person, and what music is AI generated, but really, there's so much music out there of wildly varying quality thanks to accessibility of production tools these days, it probably is literally impossible to tell the difference anymore.

Searching my username should do it. Not sure what streaming services you're subscribed to. It's all on YouTube, too.

A little bit, for sure. Tempered harshly by the fact I've spent thousands of hours and thousands of units of cash on a hobby that paid me back $45. Good thing I don't do it for the money!

Wow. I'm a hobbyist musician. I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services and have made a whopping $45 in the two years since I finally released ~25 years worth of material. (Which is a lot of why it's my hobby and not a living.)

I can't imagine the numbers this guy had to pull off to make that much.