Is Spotify Transitioning into Being a "Label?"

[Anderton]

Here's an interesting tidbit, for more see this article, which references the Wall Street Journal.

 

"Spotify could start allowing select artists to release their music on its subscription tier only. That's according to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, which, citing a source said that "Spotify has told music executives that it is considering allowing some artists to start releasing albums only to its 20 million-plus subscribers, who pay $10 a month, while withholding the music temporarily from the company’s 80 million free users."

 

"Last year Taylor Swift removed all her music from the service following its refusal to withhold 1989 from its free users. 'It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is,' said Swift at the time."

 

Of course, at this point the question then becomes how are the artists going to paid their piece of the subscription fees. We'll see. Slowly but surely, though, it looks like my prediction is going to come true that the major labels are going to be replaced by a new kind of major label.

 

[blue2blue]

Here's an interesting tidbit, for more see this article, which references the Wall Street Journal.

 

"Spotify could start allowing select artists to release their music on its subscription tier only. That's according to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, which, citing a source said that "Spotify has told music executives that it is considering allowing some artists to start releasing albums only to its 20 million-plus subscribers, who pay $10 a month, while withholding the music temporarily from the company’s 80 million free users."

 

"Last year Taylor Swift removed all her music from the service following its refusal to withhold 1989 from its free users. 'It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is,' said Swift at the time."

 

Of course, at this point the question then becomes how are the artists going to paid their piece of the subscription fees. We'll see. Slowly but surely, though, it looks like my prediction is going to come true that the major labels are going to be replaced by a new kind of major label.

 

This has always seemed to me like a sensible compromise solution -- although I think it should be an option available to all.

 

But, for those with the cachet to pull off such a strategy successfully, it could really pump up the coffers, getting a (hopefully) big bump up front -- and then transitioning into ongoing stream revenue after syndication -- which, for music that actually gets played, can be considerable.

 

(One of my favorites [one of my bleary-eye wake up albums] has got about 300 plays per track from me alone since I moved to my current stream service [Google Play] at the beginning of 2014. At the rate the same service pays my two 'acts' with tracks in stream syndication, that's about $3 per track on an album with 13 tracks. $39 bucks straight into the rights holders' pockets. Sadly, in the case of this ~45 year old album, I think it's highly likely the creatives stopped seeing any appreciable money from it decades ago. Those 60s contracts could be brutal; and, of course, those contracts are still out there and labels still push them across the desk first-off, just to see how dumb you really are.)

 

 

More artists seem to be going the independent route, anyhow, putting their music in distro channels themselves via services like Distrokid (as well as the older, more established 'full service' aggregators like Tunecore and CDBaby and others) and then hiring independent third party promo firms to work the promotional channels. After all, record labels themselves have long used 'independent' promoters to provide a legal firewall between the label and the 'promoters' who hand out 'considerations' to radio stations, media outlets, critics, DJ's, and other for-profit culture mavens to secure favorable treatment and media play.

 

After all, pop music doesn't sell itself.

 

So, once you've got everything segmented and mechanisms already in place for such arrangements -- it's really not that big a jump to just disintermediate the record label in the first place, potentially increasing the artists' take from as little as 10% (and sometimes even less if we are to believe some of the horror stories we've heard) to pretty much the whole deal (at least once initial production and marketing costs have been paid).