I honestly believe that a large proportion of people who used to habitually illegally download all the music that they desired have stopped. I know I did. I came to the point where downloading was time consuming, unreliable and didn’t satisfy me as a fan of music. So for a few years I really didn’t consume much new music. Then there was MySpace, and YouTube – without a doubt great sites for listening to music but generally a pain when you want to sit back and have music you like playing in the background and do not want to be constantly searching for artists and songs. So for these reasons when
Spotify, a free and legal music streaming service, was mentioned to me I was hooked. For lack of a better description this is how
Paul Carr (TechCrunch) described Spotify: “Spotify is amazingly slick as a product. Really it is. You want to listen to a song – almost any song ever recorded – just type its name into Spotify and it plays. For free. If you want to listen to unlimited songs without obtrusive ads, or if you want to download the songs for offline listening, then you pay ten Euro a month and it’s all yours. It’s a thing of beauty”. Its frustrating that Spotify has been unable to launch in the USA, due to labels not accepting Spotify’s model and demanding that it be a subscription service. The major labels’ attitude is boring. We’ve seen them fight music technological advances before and it’s a battle they ultimately loose. I really wish that for their own sake major labels would embrace music streaming services, especially Spotify, for their own good. As much as I rave about Spotify it does not change the fundamental facts - Spotify is not making enough money, their cost of operation is extremely high. Artists are not making enough money from Spotify either. Reports state that “in a five-month period shortly after the service launched, Spotify users enjoyed more than 1m plays of Lady Gaga's song Poker Face – which earned Her Gaganess the sum of $167” (
Guardian).
So here we are, a streaming service the fans adore yet the industry feels is ripping them off.
What needs to be taken into account the effect left on fans, fans who struggle to trust the music industry after the trash they paid for during the 90s. Fans do not want to pay for ‘filler’ songs that turn a couple of singles into an album. Parting with $15-20 to buy an album your not sure is going to be great is painful. Spotify changed that for me. I’d hear a song, or a new artist and go and listen to it free of charge, then maybe I’d listen to the album and grow to love it. Since listening to as much music as I want, for free, legally on Spotify I have spent more money on buying music than I ever have my entire life. Whether it be a digital copy of an album or a physical CD, after a while I want to own the music that I love. I want it on my MP3, playing in my car, blaring from my home sound system. THAT is the reason why labels need to embrace streaming. It allows fans the time to learn to love new artists. It’s music’s own natural selection – if your music is good enough fans will part with money to own the music, to have the t-shirt, to see the artist live in the flesh on stage.
As I am currently in the USA I’ve signed up to
Pandora. It’s ok – but I don’t think that I have the patience to deal with having to listen to music that I don’t like all the time. I’ve experienced better and there’s no going back. Many entrepreneurs are trying to jump onboard the streaming service bandwagon, but it’s is so hard to get the balance between meeting the labels requirements, creating a user friendly interface and keeping it free.
Could free streaming services be the future? Possibly - if labels will take the bullet and make the investment. Long term, I think that investment will pay off.
In the meantime, lets hope we get Spotify stateside to show how it is done.
/Lucy