#Spotify for artist gelp download

Which brings us back to THE central question here: how can streaming music help new artists make a living? Pink Floyd and Jay-Z will be fine. Most sit somewhere between the two, trying like the rest of us to understand the long-term impact that the shift from ownership to access will have on the way people find, listen to, share and pay for music. Some of them are very pro-Spotify and pro-streaming. Many artists are doing just that, engaging with their fans on Twitter and Facebook, getting to grips with Bandcamp and the various digital distributors, making crowdfunding work on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, using YouTube, running their own websites… But it’s hard work.Īnd this is why it’s very wrong to write off artists criticising Spotify as lazy luddites, unwilling to adapt to digital disruption and put in the hours required to survive and prosper. It’s exciting, because the barriers are coming down in all sorts of interesting ways.

It’s certainly harder work making a living as a freelance journalist in 2013: more diverse income streams, more demands on digital platforms and social media, etc etc. In fact, this isn’t just a musician thing.

There are many ways for musicians to make money in 2013, but it’s harder to make a living: ever-more diverse income streams (here’s the Future of Music Coalition’s 42 Ways to Make Money As An Independent Musician) more demands on digital platforms and social media more business getting in the way of making music. Here’s a possibly-controversial thought tweeted last night by Live Nation’s Ethan Kaplan last night – a man who’s been involved in the digital music space for longer than most, working for artists as well as corporations:Īt some point we have to acknowledge that the foundation of the artist rev stream is not a retail purchase. I’m not a crisis PR specialist, but even I can see that every single public statement that Spotify and its peers make in the coming days and weeks should be laser-focused on one question: how can we help new artists make a living? How are we doing it already, and how can we improve to do it better in the future? If you’re the Rolling Stones (or Metallica, or Jay-Z, or Pink Floyd), putting your catalogue on streaming services is a logical move.īut this week’s debate isn’t about those artists. The bigger you are, the more people will stream your songs on Spotify and its rivals, and the more songs they’ll stream. Its value to old, established artists is also proven. It’s about Spotify’s value to new artists. This week’s debate isn’t about Spotify’s value to the music industry, for which there’s a growing amount of positive evidence. That’s the key to this week’s debate, and it’s why Spotify’s protests that it has paid $500m to music rightsholders since its launch and expects to pay another $500m in 2013 alone are falling on deaf ears. In both countries, streaming has turned around more than a decade of decline… for the industry.

In Sweden, meanwhile, music sales rose 13.8% in 2012, and streaming now accounts for 57.5% of those recorded music revenues. Streaming accounts for 66% of all music sales in Norway, and according to a report released this week, music piracy has fallen by 81.9% since 2008. In Norway, overall music sales were up 17% year-on-year in the first half of 2013 – a startling rise in the context of the modern music industry. On piracy, admittedly that evidence comes from Spotify’s native Scandinavia so far, where the service (as well as others like WiMP) are most established.

#Spotify for artist gelp download

The argument was relatively simple: streaming music cannibalises piracy more than it does sales, and while the individual per-stream payouts are much less than for CD or download sales, paying out every time a track is played will add up in the long term.īoth of these things are true, based on the evidence available. One problem, as I see it, is that for most of Spotify’s short life, the company’s focus has been on winning over the music industry – the companies it needed to sign licensing deals with. It’s too polarised: too ‘music v tech’ and ‘luddites v futurists’ and ‘artists v corporations’.Īnd a good 80% of it is based on hearsay, wilfully-misinterpreted data, past grudges and (sadly) all-too-accurate memories that throughout the history of new music distribution technologies, it’s artists who’ve often ended up screwed. It’s time to step back, cool down and think hard about the Artists v Spotify debate that has exploded this week.