People ask us all the time. After every show, in every DM, sometimes even from other musicians: "Are you on Spotify?"

Not yet. And that's deliberate.

Right now, roughly 100,000 tracks are uploaded to Spotify every single day. That's not a typo. One hundred thousand. Every day. The platform has passed half a billion tracks, and it's growing exponentially. Of those songs, more than 50% have fewer than 10 plays.

Think about that for a second. Millions of artists pouring themselves into recordings — the writing, the rehearsals, the late nights mixing, the moment they finally hit publish — and the most likely outcome is that almost nobody will ever hear it. The quality isn't the problem. The volume is.

The Souvenir, Not the Introduction

When we started building this project, we had a choice. The obvious path was to record, upload, and hope. Get on the platform, share the link, ask people to stream. That's what every music marketing thread tells you to do.

But we kept coming back to a question that nobody seemed to be asking: Why?

Not "why make music" — that answer is easy. I've been sitting Grade 8 piano exams and scoring 98/100 in Trinity guitar grades since I was fourteen. I don't play because I want a career; I play because the instrument is an extension of who I am.

The question is: Why publish?

And "because you can" isn't good enough. Not when 100,000 other people are doing it today. Not when the most probable outcome is silence. We believe that the recording should be the souvenir, not the introduction. When someone hears me on Spotify for the first time, we want them to already know something. We want the play to mean something. We want it to be the moment someone says, "I was there," not the moment they half-listen while making dinner and never come back.

Getting the Fundamentals Right

There is also a much more boring, technical reason why we're waiting.

I've written before about how having a name like mine creates identity collisions. The same problem applies to streaming. If we dropped a track on Spotify tomorrow, we'd be fighting a war on two fronts: trying to get people to listen, and trying to stop the streaming services from accidentally crediting the plays to a Canadian pop singer or a Scottish indie-folk artist.

The aim is to get the fundamentals right before we release. By the time that first track lands, we want Google, Spotify, and every AI scraper to already have an iron-clad understanding of who "Miabella" is, where she is based, and what she does.

We're building a knowledge graph safety net on our own domain first. If the algorithm already understands that Miabella is a guitar-heavy rock act from Belfast, it won't get confused when our metadata hits the streaming servers. We're building the authority here, so we don't have to beg for it there.

Building the Wind

So what are we doing instead? We're playing rooms. Real, physical rooms with real people in them.

We're learning what it feels like when a song lands — when the energy shifts, when the room holds its breath during a quiet passage and erupts when the band kicks back in. We're learning things you can't learn from a streaming dashboard: that a break between sets in a small venue is an exit ramp, and that the gap between "sold" and "showed up" is where the real work lives.

I am sixteen. I have time. That might be the most valuable thing in this whole project — not the gear or the marketing budget, but the time to get this right. Time to build something that means something before we ask the world to listen.

When we do land on Spotify — and we will — it won't be as the 100,000th in the queue that day, hoping for a miracle. It'll be a moment.

— Mia