Spotify CEO Responds to Taylor Swift

Honestly, I think Taylor Swift was really smart to pull her music from Spotify. She made her music basically a "must-have" for a lot of people, and she forced them to pay the full price for the album. She's going to make a lot more money from this than she would from Spotify payments. Good for her; I think she earned it.

I think this might be the way that more artists start to go: use Spotify while you're gaining an audience, so people can find you and listen to your stuff at no extra cost to them. Then, when (and if) you've become "indispensable", pull your catalog (or at least new release) and sell it separately.

I think Spotify should embrace this model by having a "paid catalog" for your music library, so you don't have to leave the Spotify app to play music from the artists who chose to go the "paid album" route. As it is, I would have to open the Amazon Music app to play Taylor's album, which is an unnecessary bit of extra friction.

I'm happy to pay for good music occasionally, even on top of the $10/month I already give Spotify.

I understand that this guy is trying to protect his business, but he falls into some arguments that, in my opinion, are the true problem with music. Artists create works that do not have, by itself, be paid for. Why? I can label myself artist and claim money from people? How does that work? The people have to judge if the artist deserves to be paid. In the modern world, the artist has many ways of collect income from his or her works, Spotify, crowdfunding, broadcast live events, and so on. But what this guy calls piracy is not harming artists, it harms an obsolete industry that only views a way to collect income. They sell records and collect money. This has nothing to do with the artist. Spotify, by itself, only perpetuates this way of operate, with its fixed prices and tight contracts with the major labels.

This was a good response, though I don't really agree with a couple of statements.

1. I think that the analogy between spotify and radio is too flawed to be useful

"If a song has been listened to 500 thousand times on Spotify, that’s the same as it having been played one time on a U.S. radio station with a moderate sized audience of 500 thousand people. Which would pay the recording artist precisely … nothing at all. But the equivalent of that one play and its 500 thousand listens on Spotify would pay out between three and four thousand dollars."

Huge difference between a play on spotify and a play on radio. Radio you take what you get. If you think "hey, I'd like to listen to that new Taylor Swift song", you can scan through the channels and I suppose you may eventually, after 30 minutes of scanning, come up with it. No guarantees, though. If you want to listen to that song exactly when and where you want, you can't get it from the radio. So I don't think this is a reasonable comparison. Spotify doesn't replace radio plays, it replaces purchased or pirated music.

2. I think that Mr Ek relies too much on the piracy argument

Yes, it's better to be paid something than nothing. But I'm not 100% sure this is a good reason for a recording artist to agree to legal terms that result in poor royalties. Taylor Swift's agent (I think it was the agent) described it this way - a fan pays $15 for the album, and her friend says "why did you pay for that? you could have just gotten it off <pirate site>." Contrast that with "why did you pay for that? you could have gotten it legally for free off <legitimate site>." There's a difference in kind here.

"To say nothing of the fans who will just turn back to pirate services like Grooveshark."

Grooveshark made the first move in that space. IMO all credit goes to them. They created the business model where Spotify now thrives. The only difference I see between the two of them is Spotify raising $500M vs almost non-existant funding to Grooveshark, who knows what made one triumph and the other fail, perhaps just sucking the right cocks.

Also Daniel could have, more accurately, said "To say nothing of the fans who will just turn back to pirate services like uTorrent."; a company that was once headed by him and whose only purpose of existence is to enable piracy.