“The Future Of Music” - AGCS Vs Spotify

Remember a few years ago, when Spotify first started to creep into the public consciousness, and you downloaded it and your first thought was “wow, this is pretty cool”. Sure, the adverts were annoying, and there were huge gaps in the collection, and you really couldn’t see how it was going to be financially viable for the company itself, let alone for the bands whose music you were streaming. But, you reasoned, this was an idea in it’s infancy and within a few years time all these problems would be ironed out.

At the end of 2011, Spotify is more popular than ever. But let’s revisit those problems; the adverts have grown more frequent and even more annoying, in a pretty transparent attempt to bludgeon users into buying premium accounts. Despite this, Spotify still isn’t having huge take up for it’s paid services, and is still not a financially viable business model. And because of this, artists are given a shit deal, and many bands chose to keep their music off Spotify - leaving huge gaps in the collection. “The Future Of Music” looks pretty bleak.

Last week, in a flurry of tweets related to the launch of some Music/App crossover bullshit, Spotify invited people to ask them questions on twitter. Copy Haho’s bassist Richard Scott was quick to submit his query: “Could you maybe consider paying artists a royalty rate that isn’t insulting, or unsustainable”. Unsurprisingly Spotify didn’t reply to this tweet, so excited were they by the prospect of a world where they “power the soundtrack in every musical scenario you can imagine”. Kill me when that happens.

The undeniable fact is that Spotify is bad news for independent bands and labels. Last month musician and producer Jon Hopkins took to twitter to vent his frustration at getting under £10 for 100,000 plays of his tracks, and I couldn’t have been happier when just days later STHoldings pulled 238 of the labels it represents off Spotify. Their statement puts it more eloquently than I ever could:

As a distributor we have to do what is best for our labels. The majority of which do not want their music on such services.  They provide poor revenue and have a detrimental affect on sales. Add to that, the feeling that their music loses its specialness by its exploitation as a low value/free commodity. Quoting one of our labels “Let’s keep the music special, fuck Spotify”

Jed. x