A Decade Under Spotify's Streaming Influence

A Decade Under Spotify's Streaming Influence




Welcome to New Retro Week, a celebration of the hugest artists, hits, and cultural moments that made 2012 a seminal year in pop. MTV News is looking back to be able to see what lies ahead: These essays showcase how today’s blueprint was laid a decade ago. Step into our time machine.


Any time Spotify hit the United States in the summer of 2011, it arrived with a cavalcade of enthusiasm. “Finally” and “at last” were used in headlines announcing its launch. An NPR explainer laid out why the moment marked a milestone in the digital music era, describing Spotify’s “huge catalog of music that can be streamed, combined into playlists and accessed from any computer with a Internet connection, all for free.” The New York Times went much pithier: “New Service Offers Music in Quantity, Not by Song.”


Through its first few years of operations in the U.S., Spotify both restructured and rattled the music industry. It also came to dictate what it means to experience and share music in the 21st century. A top hits playlist the platform published to close out 2012, as an example, features one song that’s since amassed over a billion streams (“Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye and Kimbra) and others with hundreds of millions more (“Call Me Maybe” and “We Are Young,” naturally. Nevertheless Spotify had its detractors from the very starting. And in the wake of its largest reckoning although, its future may depend on revisiting them.


2022 started with Neil Young pulling his music from Spotify and inspiring a number of major artists to do same. The opening impulse to do so was in protest of podcaster Joe Rogan — recipient of a deal originally thought to be worth $100 million yet recently estimated to be potentially higher than $200 million from Spotify — spreading COVID-19 misinformation to his tens of millions of listeners. Young’s action galvanized artists like Joni Mitchell and India.Arie to remove their music, including for, among other issues, the streaming giant’s yearslong devaluation artists, segment of the very same agency practices that helped it become a world juggernaut and remake the music industry within the past 10 years.


“Artists are underpaid and Joe Rogan gets paid all this cash and it’s hard for me to, these days, just sit back and go, ‘Oh, well, that’s how it goes,’” Arie told talk show host Tamron Hall earlier this year.


Spotify founder Daniel Ek addressed the controversy in a blog post at the end of January: “Based on the feedback over the last a number of weeks, it’s become clear to me that we have an obligation to do more to supply balance and access to widely-accepted statistics from the medical and scientific communities guiding us through this unprecedented time.” The platform also added a “content advisory” tag to podcast episodes discussing the pandemic that led to a COVID-19 data hub with a link to the CDC and intelligence on vaccines.


Artist activists have long spoken out against Spotify’s corporation model. Streaming right now comprises of over 80 percent of revenue for recorded music, and Spotify is worth an announced $67 billion. Despite beefed-up podcasting pursuits (it paid for Gimlet in 2019 and The Ringer in 2020), its at-a-click recorded music library remains at its core. And although, artists receive fractions of a penny for their songs, between ​$.003 and $.005 per stream. Complicating this is the fact that nearly 60,000 artists make up around 90 percent of all monthly streams on Spotify, according to information released by the platform in 2020.


Thanks to Young, Mitchell, Arie, and the action of other major-label players, those who'd spent years railing against the streamer were finally given a louder megaphone. “The fact is that Spotify doesn’t value music,” musician and writer Damon Krukowski recently opined. “Spotify used the financial model of arbitrage to obtain an inexpensive if not free product — digital music — and resell it in a new context to realize profit. In other words, Spotify’s profit requires that digital music have no value.”


Although to completely understand the scope of this cause-and-effect chain, it’s critical to remember how Spotify was viewed once it initially launched a decade ago. Laid out in the simplest, most direct terms, the concept sounded like magic. It still does. An instantly searchable library of recorded music, for free? This was markedly different from any of the other popular music streamers accessible at the time, which functioned more like radio stations, including Pandora, right now owned by SiriusXM), Rdio, and MOG. All of those services have either been sold off or shuttered by now.





What made Spotify a big deal was that word: free. It was ad-supported, or you can pay for premium, in what is one of the most well-known success stories of the “freemium” model — where a complimentary service that reserves more advanced and sophisticated features for paying clientele. It also had time limits at the starting, which incentivized users to upgrade to “unlimited” (for $4.99 per month) or premium ($9.99).


Adding to the buzz was the fact of its invite-only status, which continued up until late 2011. You had to request an invite to join Spotify, then wait (and hope and pray) you’d get one by way of the email. I acquired mine on July 28, 2011, a barebones, text-only email with a link and then some generic instructions. “Hello,” it started robotically. “Well, the wait is over. Here’s your invite to appreciate Spotify for free. We’d like to reward your patience with instant access to over 15 million tracks. Let the music begin.”


At the risk of sounding 200 years old, it really was intoxicating to open up the desktop app, type in a song — any song — and visualize it appear, then click to play it, in full, any time once you wanted. That early experience of listening on Spotify, specifically, is fried into my memories of some crucial albums from that time that I still listen to: Fun’s Some Nights, Beach House’s Bloom, Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, mA.A.D City, and more.


The novelty was spreading, also. A friend got his invitation sometime in the fall and texted me, “I can’t believe this is legal.”


That welcome email included a link to upgrade to premium right away. From the very starting, the corporation was immediately after paid subscribers; that’s how it should make some cash. Although it didn’t turn a profit for many years. This didn’t worry Ek. “The question of any time we'll be profitable actually feels irrelevant,” he said in 2012. “Our focus is all on growth. That is priority one, two, three, four and five.”


By the time it had been in the U.S. For each year, Spotify already had artists speaking up against its paltry compensation model. “Music itself appears to be irrelevant to these businesses,” Krukowski wrote in 2012. “It is just another form of intelligence, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a purchase button on a stock exchange.” He crunched the numbers, writing that for nearly 6,000 streams of his musical group Galaxie 500’s popular song “Tugboat,” Spotify owed them $29.80 — insufficient for a professional musician to live off of. “Immaterial goods turn out to generate identically immaterial income,” he wrote.


Meanwhile, David Lowery of the bands Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven filed a class-action lawsuit for mechanical licenses in 2015, immediately after years of outspokenness, which led Spotify to establish a fund of tens of millions of dollars to compensate both songwriters and music publishers. “This is the opening real victory that artists have had in the Digital Age,” Lowery told The Toronto Star in 2017.


Taylor Swift even got involved, pulling her music in 2014 to protest devaluation of artists. “Valuable things should be paid for,” she wrote in a op-ed. (By 2017, all her albums were back accessible on every platform, including Apple Music.) Radiohead’s Thom Yorke pulled his band’s catalog, also, and even called Spotify “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” (It had all been returned by 2017.)


But it was social, almost from the outset, which is why it became so successful. In 2011, Spotify partnered with Facebook for social integration, letting your companions visualize what you were listening to and vice versa. This grew Spotify’s users by 7 million, according to Ek. By late 2012, the platform had added “Follow” and “Discover” features to propose music, solving a problem Ek had previously described. “Spotify is fantastic as soon as you know what music you wish to listen to, yet not any time as soon as you don't,” he said.


Right now, there’s more to listen to than ever before — 82 million tracks, according to Spotify’s own metrics. Who’s listening to these? More than 400 million users, 180 million of these paying subscribers. Although those figures might not account for recent evolution. Immediately after Young’s choice to pull his music, a social movement to #CancelSpotify trended far and wide on Twitter. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, 19 percent of respondents mentioned they have canceled or plan to cancel their Spotify memberships in the wake of the Rogan controversy.


An action that may help the company’s standing begins with literal pennies — specifically, a penny per stream payout for artists, one of the involves of the Justice at Spotify campaign launched in 2020 by the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. Spotify execs have suggested this may cause the company’s administrative charges to balloon, making the model untenable for anyone except the most popular artists. Still, a penny per stream is an action Krukowski likens to setting up minimum wage.


“At a penny per stream, you still need 250,000 streams a month to earn the equivalent of a $15/hr job,” he tweeted. “We aren’t asking for a complimentary lunch. We’re demanding to be paid a minimum for our work.” Imagine the headlines if Spotify were “finally” to acquiesce “at last.”









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