Very carefully-chosen figures, though. Spotify’s infographic celebrating its one-year anniversary in the US doesn’t shed any light on its number of overall users or paying subscribers there. Instead, it says that American users have listened to more than 13bn songs, and shared 27.8m with friends.
The sharing figure is broken down though: 55.3% of those shares went to Facebook, 41.5% to other Spotify users, 2.7% to Twitter and 0.3% to ‘other’ services. Spotify also says that users have spent more than 23.7m hours using Spotify apps in its desktop client in the US alone.
There’s some interesting data from digital distributor Ditto Music to accompany this, though. In another infographic based on 2011 payouts to its clients, Ditto notes that Spotify pays $0.0051 per free stream in the US, $0.0078 per unlimited stream (its mid-tier subscription) and $0.0153 per premium stream – three times the free payout.
The same infographic points to iTunes’ standard $0.71 payout for a $0.99 download – meaning around 47 premium plays on Spotify. For songs that are loved, these numbers are starting to look more balanced, although as ever this is about scale (or rather potential scale), not just a per-stream/download comparison.
Of course they would pay more for premium users and i think its good that they do that. If you promote your music properly, all these little pockets of money will surely add up.
You can NOT compare iTunes downloads to Spotify streams. In my opinion Spotify is greatly damaging to the artist. Do i have my music on there? Yes. Of course i do.
I have to. I can not predict where the shift in music will go and when fans ask me if i am on Spotify i have to say yes, it would be foolish otherwise.
But that does not stop me thinking that Spotify is bad for artists, although lets be honest , the last 10 years have been bad for artists. All we can do is embrace it and keep progressing
Thanks