“The closest format would be classical - they’ll never play my music. In the pre-streaming era, radio was important for exposure, but “ I could not get airplay anywhere,” says Nevue, who put out his first album in 1992. “You had your stars: George, David Lanz those guys on big-time record labels getting big plays in record stores - I remember going into record stores in the Nineties and a lot of times they were just playing Yanni,” says Joe Bongiorno, a solo piano artist who also set up a studio in Arizona that now records roughly 50 albums a year in this space.īut there wasn’t room for too many of Winston’s acolytes to enjoy commercial success in what was still a niche genre. Winston, who sold millions of albums on Windham Hill records, was part of a commercial flowering of solo piano music in the Eighties, when the record industry was flush and New Age came into its own, earning its own Grammy category in 1987 and a Billboard chart in 1988. But George Winston, I can play like that.” I can’t play Rachmaninoff, no way, never will happen. “It was peaceful, it was meditative, all melody-driven - these were songs with verses and choruses and bridges they weren’t these great, epic sonatas. “He was the first to be popular enough to where his music got into the culture to where a 17-year-old kid would hear it and be inspired,” adds David Nevue, who also recently crossed the billion-streams threshold. “I kind of look at him as the godfather of all this,” Mayer says. (He went Number One on the New Age albums chart in September.)īut if the names and niches differ, many, if not all, of these musicians link their work back to one source: George Winston. “Because solo piano is not an official genre in the charts, when I release an album independently I will put it in the New Age genre,” adds Matthew Mayer, a prescient pianist who purchased the domain way back in 2000. “I always get the comment back that, ‘Your music is too classical for pop it’s too pop for classical you’re not New Age we don’t know where to put you,'” says Jennifer Thomas, who describes her albums as classical crossover or epic cinematic orchestral piano works. The name “solo piano music” is a testament to the gaping holes between commercial genre definitions. It needs to have a warning sticker: Do not operate heavy machinery while listening to this.” But I said, ‘Yeah, I really am.’ I have a running joke: Don’t listen to my music while you’re driving. “I think he was trying to take a jab in a roundabout way. “ I had someone ask me the other day, ‘Are you OK with being known as sleepy music?'” says Chad Lawson, another successful solo pianist. When we dug a little deeper, this particular genre group and a lot of other genres that tend to be mellow and instrumental perform really well on streaming - there are a lot of dentist offices, a lot of work-office environments where people are putting on quiet, soothing music in the background and just letting it play.”
“But now, music gets used in so many different ways. “I t used to be that, to get signed, it had to be something that somebody thought they could sell to a mass market,” Breuner explains. That’s thanks to the rise of streaming services and an accompanying shift in listening habits. “Some of them are making far more money from their music than the artists than you see on major labels that sell OK but are not crossing the threshold of really having an income stream for years to come,” Breuner continues.
“We have a large group of solo piano players that are making a killing, making $7,000 to $10,000 a month,” says Kevin Breuner, VP of Marketing for CDBaby, which touts itself as “ the largest global digital distributor of independent music.” She’s a star in her field - to the point where another pianist says, “ I’m not quite doing Michele McLaughlin numbers” - reportedly making around $250,000 a year. Nope: McLaughlin is an independent artist in her forties who makes contemporary instrumental solo piano music.
Young artists in popular genres are racking up streams like crazy these days - presumably McLaughlin is an ascendant rapper releasing 90-second battering rams through SoundCloud? Or maybe she’s the guest vocalist on the latest reggaeton posse cut to rule YouTube? On October 3rd, Michele McLaughlin got some exciting news: Her music has been streamed over one billion times.
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