Spotify is For the Amatuer Musician
Spotify is the latest chapter in the ongoing development of a digital music economy. It may not be the music industry's dream margin of returns from digital music use, but currently it would appear to be better than nothing.
On paper, it's a compromise where everyone wins. The customer receives a pretty good online music service which is interrupted by an (annoying but bearable) advert every 15 minutes or so. The record companies receive revenue from these adverts plus (presumably) some seriously large scale market research on listening trends. (How many listeners place Justin Bieber and Napalm death side by side?)
So...What does this mean for the smaller players in the music industry? Does such a distribution platform make a difference to the market that semi-professional's and the great unsigned can tap into, or is it just yet another service to upload your music to?
Last year I recorded and "released" 2 albums by singer-songwriters. Their main aim was to have some extra product to sell while busking. As an experiment, I used CDBaby to send these out to the digital world. For a small fee, CDBaby adds your album (or single) to their website and aggregates the content further to services such as iTunes, Amazon and Spotify. There are other companies which offer similar services, but CDbaby seemed to be the easiest option.
After signing up for CD baby and uploading your content, the album slowly starts to appear on various music services around the internet. Interestingly, one of the albums appeared quickly on Spotify, but the other still hasn't appeared - although I'm promised that it's on it's way.
Once it's up there, around 2 months after a track is played on Spotify, revenue is deposited to your CDBaby account. It's worth noting that these figures reflect my experience with using CDbaby to distribute through Spotify and not dealing with Spotify directly. Every time a track is played on Spotify, the artist receives between $0.0003 and $0.0008. To put this into perspective; We get $0.64 from the sale of a track on iTunes - The same revenue from roughly 1500 Spotify plays.
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