Not our words, but those of D.A. Wallach, Spotify’s artist-in-residence, and the most convincing spokesperson so far fielded by the company in response to questions about artists’ earnings from its service. In an interview with Hypebot, he treads familiar ground in defending Spotify’s payouts: they’re mediated by labels for signed artists; they should be looked at over the lifetime of songs rather than as one-off comparisons with downloads; and that scale will be the key. But his thoughts on the latter point bear repeating: “If we can get to the scale of Netflix – which has 20 million subscribers – we estimate we’d be paying out to artists what iTunes is paying out on a year to year basis.” Again, based on publicly-discussed figures of $60-a-year spent by the average iTunes consumer versus $120-a-year by Spotify subscribers.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…