The Spotify Struggle Continues

Spotify may soon reserve new albums for premium subscribers only. Currently, an artist must agree to allow their music to be available to both paying subscribers and subscribers who choose the ad option and listen for free.

The Spotify discrepancy is not a new topic. The current business model of the company is to allow anyone to listen to their music for free. The catch is, however, that the listener is subjected to occasional ads and commercials. This idea is similar to Pandora except that listeners can listen to any song on any album whenever they want. Consequently, with this level of freedom, many artists have experienced a drop in album/single sales. As a result, artists began voicing their concerns of being taken advantage of and not being compensated fairly for their musical talent. Few, including Taylor Swift and Adele, have even taken it as far as removing their music from the site altogether.

As you may know, Spotify also offers a premium subscription option. With this option, listeners pay a minimal monthly amount to free themselves of repetitive and disrupting ads. They can also download any song they want onto their mobile device or computer. This option provides better compensation for featured artists, but artists must still allow both free and paying subscribers access to their music if they want it on the site at all. 

In the name of compromise, that rule may change.

As I mentioned earlier, Spotify is currently working to restrict certain new albums to paying subscribers only. The goal is to appease the ever-so-talented Taylor Swift's and Adele's of the music industry. Currently, they are implementing this change with one artist only to investigate how the change will effect Spotify sign-ups.

According to the Spotify agreement, each artists receives anywhere from $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream. However, it is noted that "the effective average per-stream payout generated by our Premium subscribers is considerably higher." If artists are able to restrict their music solely to Spotify's 20 million Premium members, the payout might be high enough to encourage artists like Taylor and Adele to reunite with Spotify once again.