Poll Results: If You Care About Music, Should You Ditch Spotify?
Today we learned that Spotify's revenue doubled to $577 million last year. Before that story broke, we asked the Hypebot community, "If you care about music should you ditch Spotify?". That was the title of a recent New Yorker magazine article and a bottom line question that some involved in the "Are streaming services paying musicians enough?" debate wish more fans were considering. Here are the results:
As of mid-day 7/31/13| If you care about music, should you ditch Spotify? | ||
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| Selection | Votes | |
| YES |  22% |
49 |
| NO |  78% |
172 |
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| 221 total | ||
| pollcode.com free polls You can still vote in the poll: | ||
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I voted yes, but until Artists themselves stop thinking that giving away their music for free is good advertising and promotion, the No’s will always come out ahead in today’s market place.
This is why musicians ought to be familiar with accounting. Saying revenue doubled to $577M is meaningless without examining the Net Income, which in this case was a net loss of almost $57M. To answer the question of whether they are paying musicians enough requires understanding why they are still losing money, and what it would take for them to stop losing money.
Perhaps a streaming service like Spotify is not a viable business model, since they are losing money and musicians are losing sales – a lose-lose situation. Perhaps they need to pay musicians less. Perhaps we need to understand how Rhapsody has stayed in business so long and why nobody ever complains about them.
But as it stands, I don’t see that there’s enough information here to support voting one way or the other, except on the basis of one’s nebulous and uninformed feelings.
Nebulous and uninformed feelings are a great basis for writing songs but not so great for business decisions.