This is Part 4 of a 5 part post read Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here

See also “Streaming Price Index: Pay Rates as of 12/31/11″

Fair Play for Artists

Spotify’s business model is actually the kind of extraordinarily short sighted economics that you see from people who don’t understand the business they are in.  Take Walmart for example.  They drive a hard bargain, but they are not trying to leverage themselves off the back of thieves.

Walmart doesn’t say to its suppliers that Walmart is better than the alternative of being robbed blind, but will only make the benefit so incrementally tiny that the supplier will go out of business at that rate.  This is the commoditization rate, or what we call “less than zero” pricing.  This sounds just fine to someone whose salary is guaranteed by venture capitalists, but makes no sense for the artists—and they are leaving Spotify in droves.

Walmart knows that they succeed when their suppliers succeed and the consumer succeeds.  The pricing that Walmart pays to suppliers is based on buying power and a mission of offering consumers low prices, meaning that everyone in the chain takes a little less and truly does make it up on volume.  That method is not for everyone, which is why you don’t see just every brand in Walmart.

Spotify’s valuation is based on a business model that is inherently unfair to artists, producers and songwriters.  This accounts for its low conversion ratio—it’s a couple points away from a pure pirate service and has failed miserably in the one thing it had to do to justify its existence: convert free to paid customers.

And even if it did succeed, that would be the worst possible world for artists, because there is little difference in the functionality of a top tier Spotify service and buying a download from iTunes–aside from the price paid to the artists, producers and songwriters, of course.  There is even some evidence that suggests that fans who were buying downloads are shifting to Spotify’s free service and substituting away from paying for downloads legally to a free legal service–the exact opposite of how Spotify has sold its service to artists as the “piracy buster”.

Next: Part 5

See Part 1 here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here