Spotify streaming “billions of tracks” every month
TweetSorry, the stat doesn’t get any more vague than that, but Spotify has announced in a celebratory one-year-since-launch blog post that its service is streaming billions of tracks every month, and that “tens of thousands” of new users are joining every day.
“Over the past year we’ve worked hard to continue to improve Spotify,” continues the post. “We’ve more than doubled the size of our music catalogue over the year and work continues to add more content each week. We’ve added features to allow you to buy your favorite music, play music when your connection drops out and most significantly to take Spotify with you while on the move.”
Spotify has done a marvellous job of creating a buzz around its service in the last year, and much of that buzz is justified by its excellent user experience. Of course, with an industry hat on, news that billions of songs are being streamed raises those perennial questions around licensing payments, and how soon Spotify will be making enough money in advertising and subscriptions to balance them out.
October 7th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
if spotify were really streaming billions of tracks per month, how much should labels and publishers have received by now?
majors labels may have offset royalties for equity and massive advances, so let’s just do some maths on the publishing portion.
let’s say billions means 2,000,000,000 and let’s say lowest PRS rate applies across all of Europe – that is £0.00085 per song – that is £1.7m due to collection societies for publishing every month – that is £20m due to collection societies for publishing per year. This is just for the publishing portion.
can music ally get any collection society to confirm that they have received payments of that magnitude from spotify for the ‘billions’ streamed already? if not why not?
October 12th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
[...] comment on the Music Ally blog asking the question of whether any Performing Rights Society has confirmation of a $13.7 [...]