Ok. There's been a lot of debate about
Spotify, the revolutionary ad-supported music service where you can stream music for free. Story goes, for each played track the label/artist recieves something like 0,00000023 dollars or whatever. A number so small you have to be a microscopic germ to be intimidated by it.
And sure enough, for each play there is a very small amount of money going from Spotify to the labels and artist. At least to all the labels that does not own a part of Spotify like the four major labels do.
BUT!
Here over at HYBRIS we collaborate with the worlds largest digital distributor
The Orchard. We have always done that and does not see any reason to not roll with the biggest and the best in the years ahead. That's just how we do things here. And by rolling with the biggest and the best you are represented EVERYWHERE. Try going to Portugal, we are there! Go to Japan, we are there! You can run, but you can't hide, HYBRIS music will find you! And it's our imperial fleet over at The Orchard that is colonizing the world with our music.
Going through the accounting over at Orchard you see all of all the worlds biggest music services listed. In the accounting sheet, nothing can be hidden, there it is - the deliverence - in cold hard numbers. And guess what! Spotify is number 2 with a bullet! Just after one quarter of accounting Spotify is way ahead of all competitors like Amazon, emusic and everybody else. Sure, still a long way after iTunes, but you won't build Rome in a day.
Just wanted to sort that out, so you all can get some perspective of what is actually coming out of Spotify. And on top of this there is 7 digital that just started selling mp3:s through Spotify. A service we can't evaluate yet since it haven't been up long enough.
Another promising trend is that the amount coming from Spotifys paid users are A LOT bigger if you look at the ratio money/played song. Sure, the amount of each played song is still in the area of 0,0004 something whatever. But how was the ratio before? People probably played the hell out of their CDs and LPs(We know we did) and only paid for it once.
So, in conclusion: Spotify has in less than a year managed to sail ahead of ALL the digital initiatives EVER launched at the Internet, except the iTunes store. And iTunes are not really an internet initiative is it? It would be nothing without Apples physical products like the iPod/iPhone/Mac.
Sure, all this is only valid for us, a minor indie label, but we are pretty sure we are a good example of a medium sized indie. And we are getting this kind of reports from almost all of our colleagues.
And that's that then. Except iTunes store, Spotify is by far the most succesful music service in getting money to the artists. If an artist see no money from Spotify maybe they got a shitty deal with their label?
