"I thought it might be helpful for interested parties to see what a DIY artist receives for plays of their music on Spotify and elsewhere."
and
"My financial picture would be worse if I was on a record label. Some people say that if I was on a record label, I'd have a larger reach and therefore would be making more money. To this I'd like to point out that I make instrumental cello music. There is about as much chance of my music becoming mainstream as there is of me being elected President of the USA (hint: not possible, I was born in Canada and there are naked pictures of me at Burning Man). While it is probably true that the right label could help with the reach part, I don't think they could help me enough to offset their cut, and you know what….no label has ever approached me and the ones I've approached said no, so I'm guessing they think the same thing."
As best I can tell, she is someone without a record deal who made it. And I don't think shes's even relatively big but she seems to do OK for herself.
You're implying that this is the picture someone (companies? media? society?) has painted for "purely" digital artists. It is a silly position to look at this document and say, "See! ~40,000 and only ~$100 for their efforts! Haha!". If you think about how many people use Spotify, then remember how many listen to songs repeatedly, and then also remember how many listen to songs and then leave the room because someone rung the door bell, that's a shit ton of plays. So 40,000 plays doesn't take long to accumulate and if you only acquire this amount you're not good, niche genre, etc.
We don't hold this same criticism to pure e-commerce startups. If an internet startup fails it's likely because they had a boring product and/or marketed themselves poorly, or some other reason.
The barrier to entry for someone to create music these days is very low. Software is cheap, talent is cheap, and distribution (digital) is very cheap. So why would an artist expect to make more money making a song that took maybe 100 hours to make than a person who works 40 hours a week every week?
My wife is a composer - currently attending UPenn getting her PhD in music composition. She does not typically perform her music herself. In 2009, her concert opera concerning the senate judiciary hearings on former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. We recorded a performance of "The Gonzales Cantata" and posted on Bandcamp, iTunes, and Amazon in anticipation of a series of live performances done at that year's Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
The recording earned a little over $1000 (half that from Bandcamp alone). The live performances earned several times that, enough that we could pay each of the over 30 performers involved at least three figures.
$1000 might not sound like much, but put it into perspective, it was her first recorded piece, and it's probably earned her more than what her professors have made with releases they've done. (Well, not necessarily her Penn professors) Had she released through a label? She was approached by one of the more well known 'classical' labels about doing a studio recording and 'label' release. The deal basically would have been that she'd have paid thousands of dollars, and gotten a box of CDs and miniscule residual income when all was said and done.. and this is how a lot of people in the classical world do things. The money may come from grants or patrons, but it's generally wasted.
$1000 for a single recording is not enough to live off, but $1000 for your first release, particularly a fairly obscure release, is incredibly encouraging. As a composer, she has other sources of income to chase down, whether it's commissions, or sheet music, performances, licensing, etc. I would not be surprised if after graduating, she is able to sustain a living composing music. If that doesn't work out, she can make plenty of money in private lessons.
We haven't done any 'big' recordings since then. Last year we recorded a piano-vocal piece, "Tesla's Pigeon", and commissioned a visual artist to do the cover art. We Kickstarted asking for $550 and raised $787, and while it's up on Bandcamp and iTunes, we haven't gone promotion crazy about it like we did for The Gonzales Cantata, so it's only made a couple hundred dollars, mostly through physical sales at concert performances - which themselves have brought in enough money that again, we were able to pay the performers well and have a nice amount leftover for ourselves.
I think it's a good start, and I think it's far better than she would have been able to do if she were born twenty years sooner than she had been.
So far all the examples of internet distribution "working" have been from big (or relatively big) artists.