Daniel Ek<\/a>, whose estimated net worth is $8.5 billion. The company throws lavish parties with lots of free stuff, it has grandiose offices, it inexplicably spent $300 million on sponsoring Barcelona\u2019s soccer team (claiming that there was value in having its logo and artists\u2019 names on the players\u2019 uniforms and other signage), it even spends exorbitant sums on things that are extremely cool but fiscally indefensible, like renting out all of the advertising space in the Broadway-Lafayette subway station in New York to create a month-long mini-David Bowie museum. Ek\u2019s Silicon Valley mentality, obsession with market share and frequent foot-in-mouth statements have contributed vastly to the company\u2019s image problems.<\/p>\n\n\tYet much of what people consider \u201cevil\u201d about Spotify is actually the fault of the major music companies. In most cases, that\u2019s who Spotify actually pays, and that\u2019s who determines just how much of that $0.003 to $0.004 the artists are getting. In an even more flawed system, publishing and songwriter earnings are set by the government. And although the National Music Publishers Association and pro-songwriter organizations like Songwriters of North America and Nashville Songwriters Assn. International have done a herculean job of lobbying to raise the paltry rates that songwriters receive, it\u2019s still nowhere near enough.<\/p>\n
\n\tDespite its size and might, Spotify has little leverage over music companies \u2014 Ek had to give them shares in the company in order to launch in the U.S. (resulting in a massive profit when the Spotify went public in 2018 that some majors eventually, grudgingly shared with artists once they got called out), and they own or distribute most of the music that Spotify is nothing without.<\/p>\n
\n\tSo despite Spotify\u2019s flamboyant spending and efforts to save money through bait-and-switch tactics like automatically granting audiobook access that few people want in an effort to diminish the royalties they pay to music companies and musicians, this terminally unfair streaming economy is not its fault, although the company is rarely making it better. After all, Spotify paid out $10 billion to the music industry in 2024, and $60 billion since 2008. Musicians and songwriters may well be wondering where their share of that $60 billion went.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe entire streaming economy needs to be reinvented.<\/p>\n
\n\tStreaming payments, including Spotify\u2019s, are based on an artist or song\u2019s percentage of Spotify\u2019s total global streams, which is why it favors superstars so disproportionately. Countless alternate methods have been proposed \u2014 most often, the \u201cper user\u201d model, whereby you pay only for what you listen to \u2014\u00a0but have not been adopted, because they\u2019re flawed or impractical or too easy to game, as if the current system isn\u2019t rife with scammers. (These are vast oversimplifications, but largely accurate.) Something has to change.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe music companies claim, often convincingly, that they\u2019re working on a more equitable solution for musicians, songwriters and themselves, and point to the streaming companies or the government as the culprit. But the current system is too weighted in their favor for them to work hard to make it more equitable who make the product \u2014\u00a0yes, product \u2014 that they sell.<\/p>\n
\n\tMeanwhile, Spotify itself fights to prove that it can be a profitable business. The other top services, Apple, Amazon and YouTube, have core non-music core businesses that generate unimaginable profits, so they can afford to lose money on music. Spotify doesn\u2019t have anything else except podcasts and audiobooks.<\/p>\n
\n\tSo Spotify, please raise subscription prices in the U.S. Just make sure that as much of that extra revenue as possible is going to the people without whom you are nothing \u2014 musicians and songwriters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In this economy, how many worthwhile things can you buy for $11.99 or less? A couple of cans…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,161328,3,11710,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-313035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-daniel-ek","tag-news","tag-spotify","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}