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Unsticking it to The Man
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IanB
IanB
5393 posts

Edited Jun 22, 2012, 06:37
Re: Unsticking it to The Man
Jun 22, 2012, 06:34
Five wrote:
I definitely see iTunes/Spotify as symptomatic of the larger problem, more than I worry about bloggers.

my 5 cents ...


My 5 cents of experience is that iTunes is a very equitable way for musicians to sell music if the chain is short enough that they are collecting at-source or one step remove from the source. If there is a label in between then they may well be getting ****** over. Fact is that there is more money for a label in net terms when selling an album on iTunes for £7.49 than there is in selling a physical album in HMV for £10. Fact.

Spotify has turned out to be a bad joke on musicians. It is a fantastic concept with one major problem - it is simply legitimised "free" for the benefit of major labels and there is no trickle down to the artists that makes a difference to anybody. If they had started with an EMusic style all you can eat for fixed $$$ model then there might be something to talk about but once they made free the entry level price there is almost no going back. Once free is the price point you are going to struggle to get people to pay as much as $1 for the same service even if it is enhanced.

I have given these numbers out before but a client's account figured out (and I have checked the numbers) that their new album would have to be listened to 1500 times in its entirety on Spotify before the band made the same money from one sale on iTunes (about £4.50).

If you are Universal and you have hundreds of thousands of copyrights then that is a big cheque coming in that they weren't getting from Napster. For artists the transition from Napster to Spotify is like going from slavery to the subsistence of feudalism. An improvement but not so as you would notice when it comes to life's essentials.

Also when industry commentators say "people will upgrade their Spotify accounts and pay for better audio quality" then they haven't experienced the no-bass / low-res devices on which a lot of people are happily listening to their music these days. It's simply not true.
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