Midia Research has published a blog post about ‘understanding how Spotify thinks‘, spurred by its recent announcement of its new Discovery Mode feature – and the subsequent criticism from artists.
It turns Spotify’s three interest groups – investors, audience, and rightsholders and creators – into a neat Venn diagram, but a sentence further down it jumped out at us. “Interestingly, podcasts could improve per-stream rates too: if podcasts steal music time (which they will) but the royalty pot remains set at its current share, then there will be fewer streams to share the royalty pot between. Hence, higher rates.”
It’s not an idea that’s been talked about much publicly amid the debate about whether podcasts will cannibalise music on Spotify. However, the key part of the quote above is ‘but the royalty pot remains set at its current share’. Perhaps a foreshadowing of a fight to come next time Spotify is renewing its music licensing deals…
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