If there was one success story coming out of 2013, it was that of a young electronic producer from Sydney named Harley Streten. Operating under the moniker Flume, the release of an eponymous debut album in 2012 cemented Streten as the golden boy of the ever-expanding Australian electronic scene.
Having undertaken multiple international tours and played just about every major festival one can name, Flume is not only one of the premier international success stories of the modern Australian music scene, he’s become an important inspiration for many bedroom musicians across the country.
Countless SoundCloud, YouTube, Facebook, and Bandcamp accounts list Flume as a primary influence, with the 23-year-old inspiring countless teenagers to procure their own digital audio workstation software and get to work on becoming the next Flume.
But, just how successful is Flume? How much money is a hot young Australian artist able to make in this day and age? How much money is his label making off the biggest success story in Aussie EDM? And where is the money coming from?
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Well, for starters, according to a recent profile by the New York Times, the Flume business generated revenues in the low seven figures last year. While this may not seem like much, it helps to remember that we’re talking about a 23-year-old electronic producer from Sydney with one album to his name.
And that’s not the most impressive part about Flume’s career. Besides the fact that he built his following entirely on SoundCloud, starting off with 10,000 listens and eventually garnering a staggering 150 million, Flume’s US record sales are truly remarkable.
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While Flume contends that he never expected to make money off his music — “They’re really more of an advertisement for you to see the show” — when his debut album was released in the US two years ago, it sold just 584 copies in its first week.
However, as Flume notched up more live appearances, more remixes, more appearances in commercials, and as his Facebook fans surged, sales grew. By the end of last year, Flume’s recordings alone were generating up to $76,000 a month for Mom + Pop, his US label.
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Speaking of remixes, while these don’t normally generate a whole lot of income, since a song’s original artist often retains rights, by piggybacking on other popular acts, Flume has been able to reach wide new audiences and find otherwise unreachable avenues of exposure.
For example, a remix of Disclosure’s ‘You & Me’ was used last year in a Lacoste commercial in France. While Flume didn’t make any money from the usage, the ad helped the track become a viral hit and as a result, he was booked to play the Rock en Seine festival in Paris in front of 40,000 people.
Funnily enough, the business of Flume is now managed in much the same way that it was when he first started uploading tracks to SoundCloud. As the NYT writes, Streten used to wake up every morning and check his SoundCloud plays before heading off to his job at a magazine shop.
The only difference is that now the plays are spread over countless platforms. As Thaddeus Rudd, general manager of Mom + Pop, explains, a typical album now has as many as 4,000 lines of sales data attached to it and this data is used to plot the next move that Flume and his management take, which is very likely world domination.
