Tag: Spotify

Spotify, YouTube, Streaming Services Are Killing Digital Downloads | TIME.com

Since the iTunes Store launched in 2003, digital music sales have been viewed as the music industry’s saving grace in the face of declining physical album sales and rampant online piracy.

“What we were thinking about was having full track download sales somehow replace the lost revenues from the rapid decline of physical [sales],” says Larry Miller, a music business professor at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. “What wasn’t so widely anticipated five or six years ago was that full-track download sales would begin to decline as rapidly as they have this year, especially given how nascent the streaming services still are.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT TIME:
http://business.time.com/2014/01/03/spotify-and-youtube-are-just-killing-digital-music-sales/?iid=biz-article-mostpop1

RELATED:

Music Streaming Math, Can It All Add Up?

No, Streaming is not more profitable than Transactional Sales… Not Today, Maybe Not Ever…

by trichordist

The 10 Most Important News Stories of 2013 |CoS

#8 Musicians Declare War on Spotify

Why it matters: Musicians like David Lowery and Damon Krukowski have been questioning the royalty practices of streaming services and online radio for years. When it’s the frontman of the biggest band in the world calling bullshit, though, people start listening. Streaming was supposed to be the next evolution of music consumption, but if the royalty models are really as bad as they’ve been made out to be (and by all accounts, they are), that particular evolutionary branch may be stunted. In the end, that might be for the best: a financial model that doesn’t support new artists will, inevitably, cripple the music industry.

Yorke called companies like Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” and said, “What happens next is the important part.” This is where Neil Young and his long in-development PONO music service might have to step in. Set to launch next year, PONO reportedly solves the audio loss issues Beck pointed out, though there hasn’t been much word on pricing models. Still, Yorke remarked that musicians “can build the shit” themselves, and Young’s company may be the first step in a new direction. Either way, the medium listeners absorb music is going to keep changing for everyone involved. –Ben Kaye

READ THE FULL STORY AT CONSEQUENCE OF SOUND:
http://consequenceofsound.net/2013/12/year-in-news-2013/

by Trichordist Editor

As Music Downloads Decline, Expect More Anti-Spotify Anxiety | FastCoLabs

We’re starting to get the answer to the question, “is Spotify revenue instead of transactional download revenue, or in addition to transactional download revenue”?

It’s official: We’re buying less digital music. Just like vinyl, cassettes, and CDs before it, the digital download may have reached it peak, with total sales dropping 4% from last year. The culprit? It’s complicated, but expect the already-raging debate over Spotify, streaming, and the future of music distribution to heat up.

Here’s a breakdown. In the first half of this year, U.S. music fans paid for 25-30 million digital tracks per week, according to Billboard. In October and November, that number dipped below 20 million. Billboard blames “a web of interrelated stories that show new technologies affecting consumer behavior” for the decline, with the most obvious culprit being that little green and black icon on your home screen.

READ THE FULL STORY AT FAST CO LABS:
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3023581/as-music-downloads-decline-expect-more-anti-spotify-anxiety

RELATED:

Music Streaming Math, Can It All Add Up?

Xbox Music : Microsoft to Pay The Most of Any Music Streaming Service?

Why Spotify is not Netflix (But Maybe It Should Be)

by trichordist

Bloomberg ALMOST get’s it right about Spotify and Streaming… ALMOST…

Bloomberg almost gets it right. While Megan McArdle correctly identifies the problem with Spotify in the context of current market economics she fails to recognize the source of the downward pressure on online music distribution, Ad Funded Piracy.

Lou Reed and Dead Kennedys Go Public Against Ad Funded Piracy with Facebook Posts

As we have said many times, we don’t object to streaming as a business model, we only object to the poor revenue and compensation economics that these services currently provide. In other words, the economics of music streaming are a direct symptom of the larger disease of Ad Funded Piracy – this is why we hope to see more artists speaking up about the actual source of the problem as pirate sites are a for profit business that do not compensate artists at all.

BLOOMBERG:

In other words, while the cost side has improved, the revenue side has gotten worse even faster. People simply aren’t willing to pay very much for recorded music anymore. If you’re an artist, and especially if you’re a record label, that’s very bad news. Naturally, some artists want to shoot the messenger, blaming Spotify for their paltry payments. But Spotify is not the problem. The market is the problem. Spotify is just the messenger telling them what the market is now willing to pay for their songs.

We have a suggestion for any streaming music company executives who should happen across this post – if you really want to help musicians, why not start educating the media and musicians about the cause and source of why streaming economics are really so bad, Ad Funded Piracy.

Let’s join forces and aggregate the power of the community to restore a fair, ethical and balanced marketplace to music so that artists, songwriters and performers can have sustainable careers, and you too.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BLOOMBERG:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-09/spotify-isn-t-why-musicians-can-t-make-a-living.html

RELATED:

Google, Advertising, Money and Piracy. A History of Wrongdoing Exposed.

Over 50 Major Brands Supporting Music Piracy, It’s Big Business!

by trichordist

Get Ready For The Streaming-Music Die-Off | ReadWrite

We’ve been saying for a while that we’re not opposed to music streaming as concept so much as we are about the revenue models and royalties. We’ve offered our criticisms that the math just never really adds up, even if you scale out Spotify to it’s logical conclusion.

We’ve also offered our suggestions for how these streaming services could offer a more robust and diverse environment to both artists and consumers. Looks like we’re not the only ones seriously questioning the economic validity of these models.

The streaming era is the next music industry ice age.

Beyond their broken business model, these companies share a lot of dubious promises to investors, shareholders and artists. Rdio hopes to get in the black by luring in more ad-supported subscribers. Spotify promises that when it scales up to 40 million paid users—it’s currently at 6 million—that artists will get paid five times what they make from the service today (the math works out, but that 40 million figure is a big “if”). Pandora, unprofitable and crippled by royalty fees as its user base grows, promises that mobile ad revenue can offset the revenue it’s hemorrhaging.

READ THE FULL STORY AT READ WRITE:
http://readwrite.com/2013/12/06/streaming-music-competition-pandora-rdio-spotify#awesm=~opsnA43Lt7QuiQ

by Trichordist Editor

David Lowery: Silicon Valley must be stopped, or creativity will be destroyed | SALON

Below is just one excerpt from the interview with the always insightful David Lowery in Salon.

Silicon Valley’s making money off the work of others. David Lowery is on a crusade for copyright, fairness and art

SALON : People sometimes use the Industrial Revolution metaphor. They talk about how factories replaced the artisan and the farmer, and it took decades for things like child labor, dangerous working conditions, and pollution and all the stuff that industry brought to Britain and the U.S. to be eradicated, or made humane and sustainable.

LOWERY: But whenever anybody — I mean, you’ve just brought up David Allen, and we’ve just posted this idea on my Trichordist blog that we should have an ethical, fair-trade Internet, but you’ve got people like David Allen saying you can’t have that. That would be like in the Industrial Revolution saying, “You can’t have a non-polluting factory; you can’t have a factory that doesn’t have child labor; you can’t have a factory that’s safe to work in.” Of course you can!

We’re the ****ing masters of our own destiny, we pass the laws for this country, we create this country, we decide what kind of a society we’re going to have — not the Internet. And, besides, the Internet is coded by humans. We can make the Internet do what it needs to do. I’m a technologist. I program computers. This is what I did before I played in bands.

There is nothing deterministic about the Internet. Basically, what these people are saying is that this is the first technology whereby we must change our principles to match the technology — that’s what these people are saying. Do you want to live in a world like that, with these people running it?

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/04/david_lowery_silicon_valley_must_be_stopped_or_creativity_will_be_destroyed/

by Trichordist Editor

16 Artists That Are Now Speaking Out Against Streaming… | DMN

We’re seeing more and more artists speaking up and speaking out against the unsustainable economics of the exploitation economy. We also hope more artists will also be speaking up about the Ad Funded Piracy that creates the downward pressure to justify these bad business models.

There used to be one band with the courage to do this sort of thing: Metallica. Now, there are dozens of high-profile artists, with outspoken critics like David Lowery and Thom Yorke leading a previously-unthinkable level of protest against streaming and content devaluation. Here are just a few of those voices that emerged in 2013.

READ THE FULL POST AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/12/02/artistspiracy

by trichordist

Finnish pop musician earns mere pennies on Spotify | YLE

Finnish pop artiste Anssi Kela has gone public with his earnings from content streamed via the popular commercial music streaming service Spotify.Kela claims that on average he earns an underwhelming fraction of a cent for each song played via Spotify’s free service. The precise sum is 0.002 euros, or considerably less than one cent.

Read the full story at YLE:
http://yle.fi/uutiset/finnish_pop_musician_earns_mere_pennies_on_spotify/6921281

by Trichordist Editor

Beck on Spotify: “The Model Doesn’t Work. And the Quality Sucks.” | DMN

The model doesn’t work, so we have to come up with ways in which people can help us to make music for free, or at least for much less. But the current way isn’t working, something’s gotta give.

If I tried to make my albums with that Spotify pays me, I wouldn’t make them. I couldn’t hire other musicians or someone to master it; I’d have to do everything myself.

Read The Full Story at Digital Music News:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/11/14/beckspotifywork

by Trichordist Editor