THE BIRTH OF SPOTIFY AND HOW IT'S EXISTENCE HAS REROUTED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY
The ever popular streaming service Spotify is coming up on its 15 year anniversary at the end of April. Many believe that the service has revolutionized the music industry, for both good and bad reasons.
New Listeners
For many new artists, the platform has helped reach more listeners, with the website's feature to recommend new artists and songs that match with current listening trends.
After listening to a playlist, the app will begin playing additional music it finds a close match to the previous music played. For example, after listening to a Hip-Hop playlist, it's not uncommon to begin receiving music in the R&B genre. The two have close roots after all.
With this feature, artists have a better ability to reach potential listeners.
Artist Payment
While Spotify has a free stream option, equipped with advertisement breaks, it also offers a Premium service. This costs streamers $9.99 a month, a small price to pay for unlimited streams, playlist capabilities, and the ridding of advertisements.
While Spotify offers this Premium option, artists are only getting paid between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. With large following bases, this can be enough, but for newer artists, and artists of less streamed genres, the service can be difficult to make revenue off of.
With this unfortunate reality, longer songs, such as hour(s) long Classical songs still get paid that fraction of a penny, even if a listener makes it to the end of the piece. This small payment directly impacts musicians, a disincentive for longer pieces.
The Classical Spotify
2014 born Primephonic, essentially the Spotify for Classical music, is creating musical standards of its own. The streaming service created by a team of Dutch/Americans aims to serve the Classical music world. Unlike Spotify, however, the service doesn't have a free streaming option. The company states in their FAQ section that music is simply not free and "advertisements can be highly damaging to classical music if an opera or symphony with gapless playback is interrupted."
For the People (Aka Musicians)
The Fair Pay Model pays artists per second streamed, rather than the amount of times streamed. This generates a fair payment based on the length of song, and how long a listener chooses to stream the piece. Primephonic includes a quote that sums up the values of the Classical music streaming service; "We want to pay classical music artists more fairly to encourage their creative freedom."
For $9.99 a month for the Premium version, and $14.99 a month for the higher sound quality Platinum plan, Primephonic offers a great deal to Classical music streamers and artists alike.