More Spotify

The company has lost control of the narrative.

That's what we see online more and more, entities that speak to their users in the new world, but have no presence in the old. Spotify users are not complaining, content creators are. Spotify is no different from Barack Obama, who let the media define him, to the point where his own party was running away from him. You've got to control the story or the story will control you. And the story controlling Spotify is that it rips off artists.

P2P rips off artists.

YouTube rips off artists worse than Spotify is perceived to do. But somehow YouTube is a panacea and Spotify is the enemy. And those in power know this, read Adele's manager Jonathan Dickens' comments here:

"'Spotify have always been pictured as the bad guys in this, but the biggest music streamer out there is YouTube, without a doubt," he said, pointing out that when artists or labels remove music from Spotify, it is often still easy to find it on YouTube.

'If I make a search now for Taylor Swift on YouTube, give me 30 seconds and I can have the whole Taylor Swift album there streamed. Some of it's ad-supported, so there is revenue, and some of it's not," he said.

'On the one hand, labels are trumpeting YouTube as a marketing tool: 10 million views on YouTube and it's a marketing stroke of genius. But on the other hand they're looking at 10 million streams on Spotify and saying that's x amount of lost sales.'"

http://bit.ly/1pqLZvl

Dickens is dealing with practical reality, wanker musicians are living in a fantasy world. First and foremost, Spotify is a piracy killer. As Michael Eisner once said, 10% of the public will never pay, but the rest...convenience triumphs, Spotify users stop stealing, because everything's there.

To reinforce the point, what is the alternative?

Let's say we kill Spotify and other streaming services. That will drive people to YouTube where artists get paid less, and P2P where they don't get paid at all.

Sure, we'd all like to live in a perfect world where everybody pays $15 for an album's worth of music, but we'd also like to live in a world where gas is a dollar a gallon and you can get somebody to fix your gadgets. Things change. Something is lost in every march forward. To cry about the loss of the past is to marginalize yourself. Yes, artists are marginalizing themselves keeping their music off Spotify, they certainly are not helping themselves. Sure, sales continue, but not for long. Know anybody using a dialup modem these days?

Then there's the music publisher Kobalt, which represents superstars Max Martin and Paul McCartney amongst many others, the company says "its writers earned 13% more from Spotify streams in Europe during the first quarter of 2014 than they did from iTunes downloads on the continent."

"Spotify Royalty Payments Outpace iTunes in Some Markets": http://on.wsj.com/1yYT9am

iTunes is dying. The main culprit is YouTube, but Luddites not only blame Spotify, they want a return to a service they decried at inception. Suddenly the album was unbundled, revenues were down, remember when iTunes was the enemy?

Spotify won't be the enemy for long. It's always the same. Time marches on and new services gain scale, Jonathan Dickens knows this, but somehow Davids Byrne and Lowery do not. We idolize musicians, successful ones trump techies in adulation, but that does not make them right. Furthermore, these old acts are victims of bad deals where the lion's share of the dough goes to the label.

As for labels owning a share of Spotify... That does not reduce your royalties, that comes out of the 30% Spotify keeps.

As for Aloe Blacc decrying his songwriting royalties...they're calculated differently for radio than choose your own track services. In other words, songwriting royalties are higher on Spotify. However, they are still anemic as a percentage of overall revenue. But this is an issue that must be addressed by the government, the government screwed this up. Hopefully Irving Azoff will help. Meanwhile, do you remember e-mailing the government to keep Pandora alive? Yup, you same Spotify-haters? Well, you're part of the problem, you played into Tim Westergren's hand, but you seemingly don't remember this.

How could Jonathan Dickens be so right and the rabble-rousers online be so wrong?

That's the difference between the smart and the dumb, the haves and the have-nots, the informed and the uninformed. Just like with tech help, you're on your own today, no one is going to spoon-feed you information. You're responsible for educating yourself, all the info is online. If you just glom on to inflammatory posts and promote them you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And I have sympathy for Dickens and Scott Borchetta at Big Machine when they desire to have their wares removed from Spotify's free tier. The only problem is that eradicates all the progress Spotify has made against piracy. Put it behind a paywall and people will find a way to steal it. Or they'll just stream it on YouTube for less, or nothing. And Spotify's conversion rate, from free to paid, increased when they made the mobile app free!

I'm not being paid by Spotify. I'm just dispassionately looking at the facts. Hell, if the labels had approved the U.S. launch of Spotify before music on YouTube got traction, the service would have even more paying customers.

People who put brakes on the future end up screwing themselves.

Streaming is here to stay. Revenues will only go up. The goal is to get as many people to pay as possible, to increase the pot. Tech is all about scale. There are billions of people in the world, tech reaches almost all of them, a few shekels from all trumps a lot of shekels from a few. Yes, getting everybody to pay for streaming trumps getting a few to overpay for ownership.

But that's hard for artists to understand. Who yearn for a world where the label would be their daddy, where radio would force feed their product to fans so not only would albums sell, the acts could tour.

But the labels were hurt by P2P which they could not even see. Radio has so many competitors that a good percentage of the public has never even heard #1. And the barrier to entry is so low that artists today are competing with many more competitors, never mind the complete history of recorded music, and the audience is overwhelmed by choice.

Spotify puts some discipline in the system. Its playlists add coherence. It pays artists.

If you can't see this as a good thing, you're blind.


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