To Spotify or not to Spotify?
Spotify has come a long way since it’s initial release on October 7th, 2008. Now, just three days short of turning three years old Spotify boasts over 10,000,000 members, more than 1,000,000 of which are paying customers who’ve opted for the bonus privileges that come with it’s Premium and Unlimited accounts, for $4.99 and $9.99 per month, respectively. With Spotify’s new linking system to facebook which started up in September of 2011 it’s popularity/user-base is sure to continue growing. So what is Spotify?
Spotify describes themselves as “a new way to listen to music,” and their slogan seems to be “All the music, all the time.” Spotify users have the ability to search for songs, and play them. Anytime, anywhere. Seems awesome right? It is for the most part, the library collection they have is massive, and you can import your own library into it for your own use or for your friends to use as well if you make a playlist with songs from your library that are not on Spotify already. There is some music, however, that is not on Spotify and artists can have their music pulled if they wanted to. Spotify’s most popular feature seems to be it’s playlist sharing feature, made much easier by it’s integration with facebook. A user can make a playlist and “Publish” it making it available to all of their friends. Those friends can then listen to them, and if the user who made the playlist deemed it “contributive” then those friends can add to the playlist as well.
This program has some great features and I’ve been using it extensively for the last couple days. I’ve been checking out it’s features, looking up information on it’s business etiquette, and asking friends what they think of it. It seems to be a pretty solid program, but it does have some faults. The library system doesn’t work as smoothly as iTunes’ (or my own library system for that matter) and often shows the wrong album art, and track tags are incorrectly displayed, even though that material is saved onto the .mp3 file itself. I have a compilation album from LateNightTales which reads fine in iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player, and whatever else, but reads Late Night Tales in Spotify. This sounds like it’s not too much of a hassle, but the problem is that only 4 songs on the 20 track album show up this way, so it thinks they are two different albums. The track tags are all correct so there seems to be no way to fix this issue, and it’s pretty widespread, not just this specific album, though it is more noticeable on compilation discs.
Another worry is Spotify’s business model. It’s been reported that “indie labels… as opposed to the majors and Merlin members, receive no advance, receive no minimum per stream and only get a 50% share of ad revenue on a pro-rata basis.” Swedish musician Magnus Uggla wanted to pull his music from the service, stating that after six months he’d only earned “what a mediocre busker could earn in a day”. The Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet reported in 2009 that record label Junior Racing had only earned NOK 19 ($3.00 USD) after their artists had been streamed over 55,100 times! This seems an all too familiar concept/problem with online music programs, but just how much money is Spotify making? Can they even afford to pay more? Luke Lewis of NME doesn’t think it can and states he is “convinced the ‘free’ aspect of Spotify is unsustainable” and that if “Spotify is to have a future, it needs to be a viable business”.
So what’s in store for Spotify? Will it’s popularity bring more customers, or will it continue to have a growing user-base of just that: users. I’ll stick to the free program myself, but won’t be utilizing it as much. The only feature I find attractive is the sharing of playlists. There are other websites that provide that feature, but not as many of my friends use them. Looks like another facebook conundrum: the program isn’t that good, but everyone’s using it, so it’s hard to move away from it.
