Mary Spender: Why 2025 is actually the greatest year for musicians

I know, I know... with venues closing, streaming paying pennies but the CEO spending his millions on war tech¹, and the cost of living crisis, that sounds like - potentially gaslighting - clickbait.

However, as you'll hear in this week's episode of the Drowned in Sound podcast, Mary Spender is optimistic and genuinely believes now is a great time to be an independent musician.

And she's got the receipts to back it up!

If you've spent any time down a guitar-shaped rabbit hole on YouTube, you'll probably recognise Mary. She's racked up over 100,000,000 views (yes, that's one hundred million views) discussing guitar gear, but also by creating brilliant, slightly polemic, insightful, and quite hopeful takes on the music industry. What I love about her approach is that she somehow manages to be both sincere and radicalizing without sounding particularly radical.

She's already walked the talk

Mary now has 34,000 people on her mailing list, which she turned into significant number of physical album sales before she'd even put anything on Spotify. In doing so, she's proven that Kevin Kelly's "1000 True Fans" theory actually works, and then some!

(I've seen first hand this theory in action with The Anchoress selling over 20,000 physical copies of her studio albums).

I reached out to the hugely successful video maker after watching her recent video about why artists should embrace YouTube. And she kindly found time for me to have what was a really illuminating conversation that I'm sharing with you today.

The interview covers everything from her 2050 predictions to what she'd do with the money Spotify handed to Joe Rogan, plus some properly useful advice about building communities rather than chasing audiences.

Honestly, if you're an artist feeling stuck in the streaming hamster wheel, or you just want to understand how someone's building a genuinely sustainable music career in 2025, this one's essential. For fans, this is such a powerful glimpse into the reality of being an artist on the internet right now.

As always, let me know what you think and if you have any questions, I'm going to do another Q&A episode soon.

Here's a video clip from the end of the podcast, where I ask Mary about how she might spend $400m to fix the music industry.

I'll be posting lots more to Drowned in Sound's YouTube in the coming weeks so please subscribe.

¹ = if you didn't see, many acts are boycotting Spotify