
Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels - prostoalex
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/18/dictate-top-40
======
bergjs
Spotify is the one service I'm happy to pay for. Their weekly mixes keep
blowing my mind because it's such a great way to discover new music tailored
to my taste. Plus, Spotify connect is a genius way to play music on
loudspeakers. It works incredibly well with my Bose speakers. My impression is
that they will continue to innovate in all kinds of areas so I think they have
a good chance of winning. I needed to write this because just yesterday I
thought how happy I am with Spotify. In case it sounds too fanboy-ish.

~~~
dom96
While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly
playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have
listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience?
Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my
tastes?

~~~
andymurd
Discover weekly is the reason that I pay for Spotify. I'm an old guy that
prefers vinyl to mp3s, misses the local record store terribly and hates radio,
so modern music distribution sucks for me.

I first tried Spotify many years ago, back when playlists were quite new. At
the time, I was living in the UK and a big user of last.fm but, out of
curiosity, I spent an afternoon building one playlist out of the few tracks
they had that I liked.

I was/am into house and techno but the tracks were not yet available on
Spotify back then - but the originals which were heavily sampled sure were. So
I ended up with a playlist of funk, disco, blues, hip-hop and jazz that was
kinda familiar, lotta fun.

Fast-forward several years and I'm living in Australia, where last.fm is a
paid service that had stagnated, so back to check out Spotify again...

It had millions more tracks.

It had learned from my playlist. Discover weekly is soooo good.

It had my attention and my credit card.

To the parent poster, I suggest you treat Spotify like a friendly muso willing
to lend you her near infinite collection. I've you've ever wondered about
$GENRE, go and play. I have no relationship with Spotify except as a very
happy customer.

~~~
btschaegg
Funnily enough, Discover Weekly almost never works for me. I like the overall
service Spotify provides, but the discovery features don't really cut it for
me.

As an example, I usually don't really like most music that goes into the
house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions. Most songs I find to be
horribly repetitive and lacking in good buildup/melodies. However, there are
exceptions I can enjoy very well (say the Soundtrack to Tron Legacy[1] or a
few tracks from Overwerk).

But after listening to stuff like this, Spotify keeps recommending the other
kind to me, which I just find tiresome.

I've got the same problems with other music directions (Tool and Rishloo vs.
countless rather dull prog rock tracks, or black metal recommendations after
listening to In Flames/Dark Tranquility).

The whole artist radio does the same for me. If I start it up, it's because
I'm interested in more similarities than "well, it's ordered in in the same
genre _somewhere_ "...

[1]: Yes, I'm aware that has pretty much nothing to do with what Daft Punk
usually do, but that's frankly the reason I like it.

 _Edit:_

An interesting thing, come to think of it, is that Spotify never recommends
classical music to me in their "Discover Weekly" list, although I do listen
quite a bit to such recordings. I wonder if this is because they realized that
"Classical Music" as a genre is mostly not good at all (I don't know how many
people who like Vivaldi's music would also like Arvo Pärt's works as much, but
I doubt that they're in different internal genres in the Spotify database).

Other explanations could also be that such recordings don't make enough "buzz"
or that the attribuition to specific composers is more difficult (since the
performing musician/orchestra is usually included as "artist").

~~~
joshjje
Im a bit opposite in that I love much of the "house, techno, electronica or
even dubstep directions" (though much less dubstep these days) and Discover
Weekly/Radio usually delivers some great stuff and is probably 95% of my new
finds.

Im more inclined towards progressive trance/psy trance type stuff which I
think aligns more with Classical music you mention (since I usually listen
while I work). I love electronica remixes of Vivaldi and other classical
pieces, for instance. I enjoy Tool as well, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer and
have a much more difficult time discovering in that direction, but I listen to
them less frequently as well. I also listen to a lot of rap, and
intermittently some other types (almost anything but country).

Im always finding good new electronica of the types I like and rap, but their
algorithms definitely could use some improving. I would particularly like an
unlike/thumbs down feature like Pandora had and may still have. Id like that
so that it a) never show me that song again, and b)could potentially be used
to further tailor the results.

------
iUsedToCode
Spotify is the only content provider i pay for gladly, due to their Family
accounts and Discover Weekly.

I listen to music 5-6h a day now, all for dirt cheap (less than
$2/month/person). I wish somebody would do the same for video content. Right
now you have to subscribe to many different providers to get all the good
content. So pirating is still more convenient and i still download rather than
just pay a small, fixed amount.

Well, maybe music is just cheaper to make and easier to sell as a bundle.

~~~
Vinnl
I really hope the music industry isn't going that way as well...

------
ilamont
I wonder what Apple, Google, and Amazon Music can do to compete. They have
advantages that Spotify cannot duplicate (large war chests, existing
device/platform control, etc.) and one of them (Apple) is really strong when
it comes to playlists. Apple is also doing a fair number of exclusive deals
with music publishers and artists, although Billboard says the industry is
moving away from this trend (1) although that could be wishful thinking on
Spotify's part.

Another issue that's worth bringing up: Artists are getting screwed by these
models as well as YouTube (2, 3). Only the largest stars can hope to make a
lot of money on scale or exclusives. Everyone else gets scraps. While
platforms struggle for dominance, we as consumers benefit from low-cost
subscriptions or "free" music but I feel the bands and musicians who make the
music we love are getting seriously short-changed. It's not right.

1\. [http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7625650/are-
album...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7625650/are-album-
exclusives-dead-apple-music)

2\. [http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7408970/taylor-
swift-...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7408970/taylor-swift-paul-
mccartney-180-artists-signing-petition-digital)

3\. [http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/01/28/songs-
got-151781-...](http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/01/28/songs-
got-151781-plays-youtube-received-10/)

~~~
siproprio
As a user of Apple Music and Spotify, I tell you, Apple is absolutely not
strong when it comes to playlists. Just the fact that in Spotify you can have
user created and shared playlists makes Spotify much stronger, for all the
playlists their users have. Also, in Apple Music most of the playlists for
genres other than Hip-hop and Pop are yearly "Hits" compilations.

I think that Apple is much worse than Spotify in this particular point.

~~~
ilamont
I was thinking of Apple vs. Amazon Music, whose playlists are sometimes
laughably bad. Amazon is trying hard to be a contender in this space with low-
cost plans but if they don't figure out playlists it will be an uphill battle
against Spotify, Apple and other services that do better.

------
smpetrey
If anyone thinks Spotify has leverage over record labels, I would challenge
you to compare Spotify's operating losses year over year VS. Apple Music's
operating losses year over year.

~~~
usaphp
Can you elaborate on that? What are their losses?

~~~
citruspi
184.5 MM € in 2015[0].

[0]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/r-spotify-revenues-
grow-80-pe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/r-spotify-revenues-
grow-80-percent-to-19-billion-euros-in-2015-operating-loss-widens-2016-5)

~~~
ikt
And what is Apple music's operating losses?

Spotify has always talked about losses being expected, they want user growth
at any cost.

[http://www.recode.net/2016/5/23/11749122/spotify-losses-
reve...](http://www.recode.net/2016/5/23/11749122/spotify-losses-revenue-2015)

~~~
caryhartline
It is certainly normal for startups to expect losses and only want to gain
users, but it's not a sign of strength in themselves or their business model.

If you're trying to gain users at any cost then other businesses will take
advantage of that desperation.

------
yladiz
I would rather pay slightly more per month (let's say $12 USD rather than the
current $10) than pay the artists less, even if the effect is relatively small
due to the labels taking so much cut out of the payout.

But in any case, I do believe that the way Spotify will be able to have real
leverage is for it to start being their own label, not just getting exclusive
content. I feel like it would be cheaper to just bring on either independent
artists or artists that are kind of not "into" traditional labels but are
popular, rather than pay for exclusive content since it is probably less work
but more expensive to do the latter, while the former would take a by of work
but cheaper in the long run. It's subscriber base being so large may be a
bargaining chip but I would guess that a lot of its current subscribers would
move to other services were it to shut down, so it can't be that big? Sheer
volume in a market with competitors that would be basically the same but with
a different UI and maybe some different content can't count for that much can
it?

~~~
dilemma
Yes. They should buy Soundcloud and set up a semi-automated publishing system
for that pipeline. That's a new generation of artists that the corporate
labels have no way of reaching, generally. Some of that IP will be enormously
valuable, like seed equity.

------
quink
Can't justify Spotify as I'm paying for YouTube Red/Google Play Music as I can
stand YouTube ads less than the difference between Spotify and Google Play
Music.

I bet that'll come up more and more.

One important differentiator might be to get the Japanese record labels a bit
more aligned, all streaming providers have been faring terribly on that front.

~~~
cryptarch
What does YouTube Red do better than uBlock Origin?

~~~
Emc2fma
Supports content creators instead of making them work w/o compensation

------
lucb1e
As a paying Spotify member, practices like these only make me want to switch
to DRM-free music more. Blackmailing artists with "we won't promote you if you
don't lower your prices" and wasting half a million on 2 weeks of exclusivity.
That's not what I'm paying them for; I pay them because I want to compensate
artists.

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
If you want to compensate artists, buy their albums on Bandcamp. If they're
not on Bandcamp, tell them to get on :)

~~~
lucb1e
It doesn't scale to seek them all out individually. I've tried this in the
past but it just doesn't work. Usually they don't even have a proper contact
method other than through the label or a public channel like Twitter.

~~~
Freak_NL
If enough fans ask for it you can be sure that someone in their entourage will
pick up the signals (and either act on or ignore them). For smaller acts you
can usually find a direct way to contact them somewhere on their website.

------
bogidon
Pretty remarkable how bad the writing is in this article.

------
TylerH
Now if only they'd bring back the ability to pause, play, skip, and go back
when right-clicking the icon after the program is hidden from the start bar,
like we could back in 0.9.7... and bring back the extension API...

------
dano
Spotify, Pandora, slacker, and all the rest will all get the same deal from
the copyright holders. Google, Apple, Amazon will be the long term winners
because they have ancillary revenues and music is a loss leader.

------
shmerl
I prefer DRM-free stores and musicians who release there.

~~~
SteveNuts
I prefer the convenience of having access to an effectively unlimited music
library, on demand, for a flat cost per month.

I can see how it would be a fun hobby to curate your own collection, but for
me it's really hard to beat services like Spotify, Steam, Netflix - DRM or
not.

~~~
shmerl
I buy in stores like Bandcamp which sell FLAC, and then encode in Opus for
playback. Also, prospects of your collection evaporating because DRMed service
could suddenly close down tomorrow don't sound good. Convenience or not, I
prefer to back up what I paid for.

~~~
SteveNuts
> DRMed service could suddenly close down tomorrow don't sound good

I'm not worried about that - it's not my collection, it's Spotify's. I'm
merely paying for the unlimited consumption of their collection on demand, not
to purchase the songs and have them for life.

It'd be a different story if I expected the songs I listen to on Spotify to be
available forever, but I don't, and that's not what I'm paying for.

~~~
lucb1e
You don't expect to be able to listen to the songs forever? Fair enough; I
mean, you can always take another subscription service if Spotify would go out
of business.

But I've been there.

When Grooveshark quit -- I was a paying member and had no up-front notice -- I
lost my complete library. I've looked into making a back-up before and figured
out some technical requirements for that (e.g. I cracked the "encrypted"
cached files) but never really got around to it. A list of which songs were in
my library and playlists would have been all I needed, but I had no such
thing.

Spotify doesn't offer this either. Like with Grooveshark, you can find
technical ways of getting around it, but they're not jumping at the
opportunity to provide a JSON export that you can import into another music
service.

The other side of the coin is that not all music is available. Even now on
Spotify, if you enable "show unplayable songs" there are a lot that turn
unavailable every month. I don't want to think of which part will not be
available at a competitor's.

For all these reasons, I agree with the person you're replying to. But I made
the same decision as you -- i.e. I use and pay for Spotify -- because those
indie stores just don't have enough music by a long shot to make it worth the
trouble. Ideally it would be that way, though.

~~~
pepve
There is actually a straightforward way to export data from your Spotify
account, try this:

[https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-
us...](https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-user-saved-
albums/)

~~~
lucb1e
Tell that to my mother. I'm serious here: it's easy for you and me -- heck,
I'd just collect it via DBus, reverse Spotify's local storage or scrape it
from the web player. But that takes effort and expertise, something very few
people on this planet are both capable of and willing to do, unless it's clear
that the service is going out of business soon. Furthermore, hacky exports
like this will not be importable on other services either.

~~~
pepve
So make a service that emails people their saved albums. Send monthly
incremental updates. Their backup storage will be their inbox, and restoring
the data to a new service will be a couple hours manual clicking and typing.

The hard part is explaining to our mothers that their music app might become
unavailable, that they should care about this, and that they should take
action to mitigate the effects.

But on the other hand, consumers get locked in all the time, and civilization
hasn't collapsed yet.

------
anotherthrow2
This is nothing more than PR fluff. Spotify is in big trouble, as waging war
with Apple is proving to be far more costly than they expected.

I want to know how much Techcrunch got paid for this advertisement.

~~~
refulgentis
My instincts feel that way, but Apple Music announced they crossed 20 million
paid users in 12/2016, 40% of Spotify's 50+ million. Anecdotally, discover
weekly is a tremendous hit.

Makes you wish for functional public capital markets so we knew the real
story.

~~~
JamilD
Spotify has partnered with telecoms, newspapers, and others to provide bundled
subscriptions -- inflating their "paid" subscriber amount.

A good chunk of those 50m aren't paying $10/mo; they've expanded their
partnerships (in part) to inflate that number.

~~~
newsat13
Very interesting. Can you give me some pointers on what kind of partnerships
they have?

~~~
jeremymcanally
Every Starbucks barista (who's worked at Starbucks for some number of months)
receives a free Spotify subscription, for example.

------
rotwood
This article is nonsense.

------
rhabarba
Spotify will not win unless they find a way to materialize and dematerialize
vinyl LPs on demand.

------
quanticle
_As we said above, their artists would suffer from the loss of distribution,
but they’d also suffer a loss of revenue._

Not much revenue. Spotify is famously stingy in how much it pays artists, to
the point where big names like Taylor Swift are keeping their releases off
Spotify.

~~~
tjoff
Isn't that because the artists are having shitty deals with the record labels
though?

~~~
k-mcgrady
If you are completely independent the amount you get per play (before your
distributor - e.g. CDBaby - takes a cut) is $0.006 - $0.008. If we say you get
the max per play and you're a one person act (not a band) you need about
250,000 streams to make $2000 (just about enough money to live on). Obviously
you have other ways to generate income (merch, touring) but even getting
anywhere near that number of monthly streams for an independent artist with no
marketing power/skill/money is almost impossible regardless of how good your
work is.

If not going to get into the usual debate about free market and value but I
thought it was worth laying out some actual figures as 'labels are taking the
money' is the go to argument here when in reality having no label isn't going
to work for most artists either.

NB: To get your music on all of these digital services you need a distributor
like CDBaby (many others are available). I left out their cut in the figures
above but for digital services it is 9% of net income.

~~~
tjoff
If I understood it correctly about 50% (old and perhaps quite obsolete figure)
of the monthly fee goes to labels and artists. That sounds reasonable to me,
and given that that means roughly $5 goes directly to labels and artists from
my subscription.

A Spotify subscription is more than I have ever paid for music, even half of
it is - and the moment I stop my subscription I loose access to all of it. To
me it sounds like the labels are the ones dictating, one way or another, who
get's paid and how much.

~~~
k-mcgrady
I'm not sure I understand. The numbers I quoted were for someone not signed to
a label. They get the stream rate that Spotify sets. Your original question
was do artists not make much money because of bad deals with labels. The
numbers clearly show that they don't make much money even if a label isn't
involved because stream rates are less than 1¢ and subscription prices are
very low.

~~~
tjoff
It isn't hard to imagine that spotify needs to recoup the costs lost by having
to please the labels. My point was that I'm paying a fair price and Spotify
are relaying a fair share of that.

Now where the money actually ends up seems to be up to the labels.

------
visarga
I got 99 problems but Spotify ain't one! because I live outside their small
map. I don't exist for them and they don't exist for me.

Edit: just joking, I am actually irritated I can't check out the Discover
Weekly playlist, whenever it comes out in discussion. I just checked, my
country is still not on their list.

~~~
ZeroMinx
Which country is that?

~~~
visarga
Romania. Spotfy-istan ends at Hungary, right at our border. We're part of that
Europe that doesn't get into Spotify.

