Net: Spotify on the future of streaming music

Spotify on the future of streaming music: 'We want to cannibalize piracy':

Today's the transition day between SXSW Interactive and the start of the much larger and arguably more interesting SXSW Music festival, so it's only fitting that Spotify, Rdio, and turntable.fm all held events and keynotes this morning. But while Rdio launched a total redesign and turntable.fm announced a series of major label deals, Spotify's chief content officer Ken Parks instead held a thoughtful panel called "The Future of Music" with Billboard editorial director Bill Werde and Disturbed singer David Draiman. The contrast was stark: while Rdio is in the middle of a full-on competitive reinvention and turntable.fm is just signing the paperwork that enables its business, Spotify is talking about nothing less than saving the music industry from itself. "We've taken millions of people used to stealing music and gotten them to pay more than their fair share," Parks said in an interview after the panel. "By historical standards, someone spending $120 a year is spending a lot of money on music."

And make no mistake — the total amount of money is enormous. Parks told the room that Spotify now has some 10 million monthly active users, of which some three million pay for premium subscriptions, and that the company has already paid out some $250 million to rightsholders. "By the millions there were dedicated pirates who now don't see a reason to pirate," because of Spotify, he said. "Before Spotify there was no market in places like Sweden."

Of course, the biggest issue for streaming services right now is buy-in from artists unhappy with minuscule per-stream royalty rates estimated to be just a fiftieth of per-download rates, but Parks and Draiman repeatedly called such comparisons "asinine." "What should matter is how many people are being monetized and the rate of that monetization," said Parks, with Draiman saying artists obsessed with per-stream rates are "cutting off their nose to spite their face." Parks was even more blunt after the panel, saying that artists "trying to put the genie back in the bottle" by holding out on streaming services are "on the wrong side of history and technology and progress."

Source: The Verge