I’m using my Spotify Premium account to listen to Arcade Fire’s great album, Reflektor, as I type this... Spotify is a music streaming service brought to America in 2011. Spotify is actually a great way to listen to music, discover new music, and also provides a decent radio feature—like Pandora—but streaming services like Spotify and Pandora are treating the musicians terribly. Spotify and other streaming services in general are bad because they hardly pay small artists anything, small artists are the ones who need the money the most, and they are bad for and don’t care about music itself.
Netflix, the go-to streaming service for movies and television shows, spends nearly two billion dollars a year on licensing all of the content provided to it’s users (Kumparak par. 3). Spotify has only paid one billion dollars total (Spotify) since their foundation in 2006, eight years ago (Wikipedia). Spotify has over 20 million songs available for streaming (Spotify), while Netflix only has a few thousand movies and shows available for it’s users. That just gives you some perspective of how little Spotify has been paying it’s artists. The typical artist on sites like Spotify make as little as 0.4 to 0.6 cents every time their song is streamed. This means they don’t make ONE dollar until their song is played around 166 times (Edwards, par. 1-2). One indie band’s song was played 7,800 times on Pandora, and they got paid a tiny 21 cents. With that math, on Pandora, it would take around 312,000 plays to reach the equivalent of one album sale (Krukowski, par. 3-4)... Spotify needs to pay artists, especially smaller artists and labels, more because they are the ones who need the money the most.
Small bands need the money for many reasons. If th...
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...s. Spotify Ltd, 2014. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Krukowski, Damon. "Making Cents." Pitchfork. Pitchfork Media Inc., 14 Nov. 2012. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
Kumparak, Greg. "Netflix Spends $2B Per Year On Content, Primarily On Licensing Movies And TV Shows." TechCrunch. AOL Inc., 24 Apr. 2013. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Owsinski, Bobby. "The Music Industry Moves Kicking and Screaming Into A Streaming World." Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 10 Jan. 2014. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
Reitz, Dan. "Spotify? Not Much Better than Piracy. Sorry." Dan Reitz Dot Com. N.p., 9 Apr. 2012. Web. 11 Feb. 2014.
Schonfeld, Zach. "Why Smaller Artists Won't Be Joining Thom Yorke's Crusade Against Spotify." The Wire. The Atlantic Monthly Group, 17 July 2013. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
"Spotify Explained." Spotify for Artists. Spotify Ltd, 2013. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
"Spotify." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
The music industry has changed in more ways than we could imagine. At first we started with artists just selling singles, then it transformed over to people buying albums, and forn then on iTunes started to sell songs for just cents. In the year 2005, Pandora was launched on the Internet and later they created a mobile app. Most of the artist’s music can be found on YouTube. Free downloads has affected this industry as well. The music industry has found many ways to let the fans listen to the music they love. Internet streaming radios like Pandora are having to pay artist for copyright reasons. The music industry had two significant changes in the 21st century: the physical albums have dropped but streaming music has increased, even though artist get little to nothing in return.
“It is estimated that such illegal product costs the music industry more than 300 million dollars a year domestically.” This is why the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is taking a strong stance against MP3 piracy. The damage done to the recording industry in lost profits, increased prices, and lost jobs is overwhelming. In an attempt to put a damper on file swapping, and recapture lost revenue the RIAA has been suing people ...
The Internet has cut into the music industry's profits. It reduced the demand for CDs, increased the interest in singles and let people decide whether they want to pay for the new Prince album. This alone could be offset if all of the people pirating music would go to their favorite artists' shows. However, the hard economy has rapidly cut into people's ability to spend on luxury items and concerts rank right up there with sports in terms of practicality.
I have been asked to identify and evaluate two important current developments in the music industry. I will be discussing the rise of electronic dance music and also the growing number of musicians gaining success via YouTube.
...iding convenience, selection, personalization and a low cost method for product delivery. Netflix posted gross profits for the fiscal year ending December 2006 of 996.7 million and increase of 314.5 million over the prior year. Net income increased by 16.8% during the same period. On February 25, 2007 the firm, hit a milestone when they delivered the 1 billionth DVD.
In the past, singers made money through CDs and cassettes. These forms of media have been replaced with digital copies of albums and songs. Even this method of accessing music has begun to fade away with the replacement of streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, or Soundcloud. Artists’ music has also been used in advertisements. This can negatively affect the artist’s career. Music artists shouldn’t have their songs in advertising.
...election and convenience of P2Ps. Because of consumer’s tendency to download single songs by many varying artists, many may wonder if increased Internet use will eventually exterminate the record album from existence. Personally, I do not foresee the death of CDs and albums as a product. The MP3 format is not quite CD quality, and the singles that are typically downloaded by consumers do not always reflect the talent or best product of a certain performer. Singles are what will make money, but B-sides, the songs that people do not buy the CD for, are also a culmination of an artist’s hard work. B-sides make an album good or bad, and consumers simply do not download B-sides. I fear that buying an entire album will become more rare as these new programs emerge that allow consumers to buy one song at a time, but the album will prevail. Newspapers and Magazines are now available online, but they still appear for retail in stores and by offline subscriptions. Online music purchasing shows no signs of dropping, and the consumers show no sign of listening to less music. The industry just has to take the initiative to make the music more accessible to music listeners at a fairer price.
Spotify is an on-demand music streaming service that provides a two tiered service to its users. The free service allows users to listen to any song on demand within the application’s music catalogue, but with the presence of ads. The premium service, however, is completely ad free. Launched in 2008 in Sweden, Spotify has grown and currently has over 24 million active users. (Sisario, B) As a result of several deals struck with EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner Music Group, Spotify currently holds a music catalogue of roughly 20 million songs.
An “analyst” was quoted in the case (in 2002) as saying that “people will pay for music on the Internet, eventually.” This person was skeptical of the willingness of consumers to pay for
Van Buskirk, Eliot. "SoundCloud Threatens MySpace as Music Destination for Twitter Era." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 6 July 2009. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. .
...his since they make money for licensing the music for the streaming services. Labels are embracing the streaming services since this allows another way for making revenue in a not so strong music economy.
The most significant down side to technology is the loss in revenue from album sales. Illegal downloading of music has become prevalent in today’s society, and many artists—major or independent—receive little to no profit from album sales. Many companies, such as Apple, have tried combating the issue with protected file formats, but a loophole has always been found to bypass the protection. Unsigned and independently signed artists hurt the most, as they pay almost everything out-of-pocket to produce their music. The only feasible response to the loss in revenue, artists have found, is to increase tour dates. In today’s age, it is not rare to find artists who tour more than eight months out of each year. Touring has become one of, if not the only, reliable source of income for many
Consumers rely on their smartphones and laptops to listen to music on-demand. Although there are many music streaming companies, Spotify was one of the first to let consumers access millions of artist without buying individuals songs or albums. With Spotify, consumers pay for a premium subscription that allows access to every artist, album, and song within their library of
People pay low subscription fees to streaming services, and as a result of this, listeners can be exposed to new artists and help these artists become popular (“Music Industry”). New artists are exposed to more people as streaming services often increase the amount of artists that people listen to. While streaming services do result in more exposure for an artist, that’s where the benefits stop. One of the issues with streaming services is payment issues. "Public relations missteps in the early 2000s kept many musicians from speaking out about economic issues, artists and executives said... But the shift toward streaming in recent years has prompted many musicians to investigate the changes in the business and comment online (Sisario)." Artists are not being paid much for providing their music to streaming services, but these issues and artist protests are being ignored by executives of the services until a high-profile artist makes the wage disparity public. "Streaming services pay a lot less than downloads, with the artists receiving a fraction of a cent per play on the service. Newer artists could struggle with the level of payments offered by the services, opponents have argued (O’Brien).” Hardworking artists are not receiving as much money from streaming services as they did from people purchasing their albums. This
Spotify is on-demand streaming music player. After registration and downloading the desktop application user gains access to more than 20 million songs that are currently available on Spotify [1]. The main characteristic of Spotify’s streaming service is that it does not sell music, but it gives access to it. Streaming digital music is based on agreements with content owners - record labels, digital distributors, aggregators and publisher collecting societies, to whom Spotify pays out royalties [2]. Without these agreements there would be no music to stream. Basically, Spotify has an intermediary role as it distributes music content from right holders to listeners.