After more than a decade of declining sales, the music industry believes streaming services like Spotify offer a path to a return to growth in the future. But not every musician agrees and the row is growing louder.
From Thom Yorke labelling Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” to Taylor Swift removing all her albums from the service, a series of prominent artists have now questioned the streaming model.
Swift’s removal has generated a new debate about streaming: whether free streams supported by advertising are as valuable as streams by people paying £9.99 a month for a “premium” subscription without advertising.
“The premium tier to me are real active record buyers, paying their $9.99 or €9.99 or £9.99 a month,” said Jonathan Dickins, who manages Adele, at this month’s Web Summit conference. “My feeling would be, to get around the situation with someone like Taylor Swift – but Spotify won’t do it – is a window between making something available on the premium service, earlier than it’s made available on the free service.”
Dickins said he believed “streaming’s the future, whether people like it or not”, but suggested that Spotify needed more scale to prove itself. “Spotify will work if they get enough payers,” he said.
This is why the Taylor Swift affair is a genuinely dangerous moment for Spotify, which is used to artists including Adele, Coldplay and Beyoncé “windowing” their new albums: keeping them off streaming services for a few months after release to maximise sales of CDs and downloads.
By removing her entire back catalogue, Swift has generated a new discussion about whether albums should also be windowed between the free and premium tiers of services like Spotify. Her music remains available on premium-only rivals like Rdio, Napster and Apple-owned Beats Music.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/15/taylor-swift-music-spotify
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