Spotify Now Has 15M Paying Users, 60M Overall
techcrunch.com
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I do like the Spotify model, but find between iTunes, Pandora and Sirius my music needs are saturated.
Pretty much the same deal. Stuff comes and goes, and there's no warning to the user (I imagine that a warning that content is going to go away would increase piracy).
This is why I still buy CDs.
It's a great way to inflate subscriber numbers for an IPO, but I doubt it's a long-term trend.
For people who like to listen to a wide variety of music and like to discover new music, I don't think you can beat what Spotify offers. If you have a more tightly contained bucket of music and don't want to expand in too much, it probably makes more sense to own your collection.
I've discovered a ton of stuff and enjoyed things one-off like live CD's that I would have never have purchased outright through iTunes.
I ultimately chose Spotify over Rhapsody because of playlists. I think when I first started, I actually prefered Rhapsody's mobile UI but Spotify's has gotten better since. I remember using Rhapsody's web/desktop service in the mid 2000's, but it wasn't an iPod replacement then because it's offline capabilities were limited and limited to devices that I didn't like. Once mobile became realistic to stream music, the services started making a lot more sense to me.
Eh... Sort of. If I want to listen to something within (making it up) the top 50% most successful recording artists, or something relatively recent otherwise, it's normally got something at least.
If I want to listen to underground hardcore records or weirdy free improv or something, I'm S.O.L. on streaming services.
Still, I pay my £10 a month, because it's good for a lot of things, and convenient.
Rhapsody has many (though not all) of the collected volumes, dozens I'd say. Spotify has one 1970s album of theirs.
Also noticed a standup comedian on Rhapsody, Ralph Harris... his album Hickey Head is there. Nothing on Spotify except a single track on someone else's album.
I find about one or so artist per week that's not on Spotify.
For contemporary stuff of that level of nicheness, Bandcamp is a much better source. And selling one $5 download/print-on-demand CD is probably more lucrative than all the Spotify streams most bandcamp bands could ever hope to get put together, so it's hardly surprising that they go this way. Spotify seems a more sensible partnership for labels with significant back catalogue than individual artists. (Which makes it peculiar that I can't browse by label, but there you go.)
I like Spotify for classical music and jazz, but my tastes are more 'mainstream' in those categories. It also has a surprisingly good collection of house/techno/etc singles, but I kind of need the files for those for DJing purposes and such.
Spotify more than makes up for it with curated playlists and apps (pitchfork, Last.fm, Hype Machine) making music discovery easy and pleasant. But if someone wants to listen to particular songs, like they would from their own collection, their mileage may vary.
https://www.spotify.com/us/family/
It launched a few months ago.
Before I joined spotify (about a year ago) I hardly ever bought CDs or MP3s (defintely less than the £120/year that Sptofy costs) - there must be many other people also who are paying for Spotify now who never used to spend much on music before
Not having to copy over my playlists to my phone, but just being able to sync, that feature alone is worth the €10 subscription to me.
I discover a song, add it to a playlist from my mac, and I can listen to it next time I leave the house.
Not that much.The music industry is over. Call it the entertainment industry , where the popularity of a song is mesured by youtube views,not actual sells. Even iTunes don't pay that much now a days. It's good, because any artist can "grow up fast" with a good social network marketing strategy. It's bad, because some kind of music need some investment only big producers could afford before. But crowdfunding can fix that. Yet no one can deny that the amount of crappy music today is just overwhelming (looking at you "hiphop"). Something like Nirvana could never happen today.But bands like Nirvana could have a moderate success.
But if you ask me, as an artist,while it's tough,i'm ok with how things work today,since I actually do some gigs and that's the most interesting part.
Something I've wondered for some time, is if the world needs a music service that both allows smaller artists to stream their music from it, but also negotiates with companies like iTunes/Spotify/AmazonInstant to allow their music there as well.
I used to use oink/what.cd to download all my music, but now that I use Spotify I never stray from it. A friend emailed me J.Coles newest album in MP3 but I opted to just wait until it was on Spotify for the sake of simplicity and accessibility.
Similarly with movies, whereas I would once always simply torrent them, sitting in front of my TV and just renting them for $4 feels so much cheaper than battling an advertising laced torrent site and figuring out how to stream it from laptop to TV.
Pirating stuff was much easier than buying CDs or DVDs, but purchasing stuff online has became even easier than piracy.
$10 per month to listen to almost anything is such an astounding underpricing of the value I personally derive from the service. I can hardly believe my good fortune to be alive at a time when I can pay so little to listen to so much with so little effort.
Even if every American paid $100 per year, that maxes the revenue at $30 billion with no further growth possible.
Now how much of that it going back to the music creators? Almost zero.
If I take your high school numbers and extrapolate ($250/year across 300 million) with a $.50 per CD (20 albums per year) we get a $75 billion business with $3 billion actually going back to artists. For 20,000 CD's (roughly the number of releases last year) that's 150,000 per year back to the CD creators.
That's an ENORMOUS difference.
Yes, these are all bounds (not everybody would buy--there were fewer CD's in the past--CD's were more expensive to produce), but you can see the difference.
Now, this isn't all Spotify's fault, but the middlemen are taking WAY too much out of the pie.
In addition, there are so many entertainment options that music has to compete with that it will never get back the privileged position it had in the late 60's to early 80's before both VHS and videogames.
i think pure torrents + physical sales would actually result in better money for artists than the same situation + Spotify.
there are some who argue that the pricing model is not really incorrect/askew, but i think even they tend to admit that its insignificant income from the perspective of the artist.
(as someone who is not into pop music, i really don't care about building a whole economic/industrial mechanism just to make sure that beyonce & WMG keep getting a disproportionately large piece of the pie compared to independents, that is not really in the spirit of the internet IMHO it is just a web-based continuation of the old system that smaller artists hated...)
I know for signed artists it is a really small amount.
It seems like most groups have accepted that they will make most of their money from shows and merchandising. At least that is the feeling I get.
"i got a check from spotify last month. $.22 was the amount. that help?"
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/y542u/hi_im_rjd2_produ...
It's not Spotify's fault that RJD2 is only as popular as obscure Swedish death metal or obscure 80's folk goth music.
I understand there are technicalities but 22 cents/month is what you'd expect your complete unknown "electronica in basement" neighbor to make off a major distribution outlet, not known artists, even if they are obscure (which I think is a ludicrously out-of-scale term considering these bands have international followings).
I'm sure someone in this equation is making money, thats why it rubs me the wrong way.... it is an extension of the industry rather than a correction of it.
If that's true, something is deeply and terribly wrong with the license agreements. These are not some amateurs, but pretty big acts with fans from all over, and while I despise saying they "deserve" this or that I would at least expect the sum to matter.
So assuming one follow ~= one view per month, that means Youtube is 600x more profitable than Spotify. Interesting since Youtube is free and Spotify has paid stuff.
So RJD2 should be making significantly more than the bands you mentioned given that his number of streams should represent a larger portion of spotify's total streams.
[1]http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#royalties-i...
Please no sob story about innocent artists being exploited by their publishers. Same logic applies - why would artists continue to work with such publishers?
If I find an artist I like I will definitely go to one of their live shows. I feel like I spend more on an artists now than I did when I bought their album outright.
regardless, they don't cover the bands i like and half the music i like isnt on spotify so i just do it the old-fashioned way using discogs.com, downloads, and some good sites that have "related artist" webs. wouldn't you know it, the best site i know for related artist webs isn't a major industry service, its a torrent site! & they accomplish it trivially through user-edits...
so i guess my point is i think its true that Spotify can be convenient for some people, but it doesnt refute my point that they are not trying to do anyone favors (unless it fits their current branding strategy). Spotify is not some techno-anarchistic's grand vision of the music industry. it's not helping music fans discover more about their tastes, it is generally colluding with industry to guide listeners toward their profit sectors. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there is a complex sequence of kickbacks between labels, Spotify, and the venues themselves, designed to minimize artist royalty/payouts. If you follow the music industry you know the deals for artists are generally pretty bad & I don't really believe in the "but I go see them live!" rationale because some artists don't tour or aren't big arena acts. AFAIK it's really hard to recoup tour costs unless you are playing decent-sized venues at every stop.
i guess it is just hard for me to get into the feelgood mentality of the music scene when i feel like the technology available could allow us to be much more taste/trend/industry-agnostic but instead seems to just be an extension of industry power (Pitchfork being a major industry player as well...), and I generally feel like the quality of the artistic output is in decline so I don't want to buy into most of the over-produced crypto-pop junk they are selling (fans of 60s/70s/even 80s music are accustomed to a much greater wealth of musical diversity). As I mentioned though, I am not into music journalism i just use artist webs. Maybe if there were some tastemaker I really wanted to follow I would see this as more convenient but I just don't experience music that way. Or at most I'd be like "well, convenient for me, sucks for the artist".
I think I mentioned in my previous comment -- it's not that I can even prove the pricing model false, I just know it doesn't do shit for the artists... 1 sale of a self-published physical album is more profitable for most of them then a year's worth of Spotify listens.
i bet a solely torrents + physical sales model would actually be MORE profitable than involving Spotify... Spotify to me is really only a mechanism for absolving people from the guilt of theft, and conveniently it funnels money back to yet another corp.
What if, instead of being paid per play, artists were compensated based on the number of unique visitors that played their music? So if one person plays one of their songs, they get paid (for instance) a whole dollar. If one person plays that song 5000 more times, the artist still only gets paid one dollar. But if 5000 different people play that song, the artist gets 5000 dollars. Once. I think this scheme would compensate artists much more fairly, like iTunes, while also providing the cloud hosting and flat monthly fee that attracts users.
However, I think what might confuse people in terms of perceived fairness is that with a flatrate, people might listen to a lot more music. But it is a tradeoff between people listening more but paying less per song and people listening less and paying more per song. It's a mistake to think "whoa, if I had sold as many CDs as people listened to my songs on Spotify, I should have received x million $$$." The reality is people probably wouldn't have listened as much without the flatrate.
So in the end all that matters is how much money you receive, not how many times people listen to your songs.
And what have you gained if you limit people to 10 songs per months vs thousands, if they spend the same amount of money? It is only an inconvenience for the audience.
At some point people stop looking at the paying to non-paying ratio of your costumers and when you starting bringing close to 2bln a year you are probably there.
No one really looks at how many "free apps" people download from the app stores and says Apple are padding their numbers when the app stores brings higher revenues than the GDP of many countries.