But what is fair when it comes to remunerating artists for single plays?

Spotify can't be compared with one-off album downloads which require a fair amount of confidence in the product before a consumer will purchase. Indeed, when I think about the number of plays I gave some of the albums I bought when I was a teenager, I would wager that those artists got pretty poor value for money in that sense. Spotify (like all music streaming providers) offers a market price to artists for individual plays of individual tracks, which is a completely different product, so of course the price is going to be much lower. But on the other hand, this will lead consumers to consume more, which must benefit the industry at large, not least in shifting concert tickets.

As an aside, Spotify still don't turn a profit (in fact their backers have pumped something like $200m into it without return since it was founded), so they can hardly be said to be exploiting the artists.

I don't know enough about the music industry to say that Spotify is the definite answer, but it seems at least to be an effective means of getting the word out for artists while still ensuring some form of remuneration.

Posted By: King on February 5th 2015 at 14:58:31

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