By Tessa Hayward
Transcript:
Today I will speak about a recent development in digital music sharing, streaming platforms like Spotify. They have grown so much recently and I will discuss how much this growth has impacted the music industry. “Spotify [is]…the global leader in streaming” currently, in front of other platforms like Apple Music, Pandora and Amazon Music etc (Coelho & Mendes, 2019, para. 44). Spotify, unlike most other streaming applications, utilises a freemium model (Chaffey, 2015, para. 6). Users can use the service for free or pay for a premium subscription to receive some additional features. Free users can listen to songs, but they do not have access to premium features like: downloading songs for offline listening, ad removal, unlimited skips and high quality audio (Chaffey, 2015, para. 8; Spotify, 2019, sec. 3). Spotify Premium costs around $11.99 per month in Australia, but there are recurring pricing deals that make it affordable for new users to try (Spotify, 2019, sec. 1). Streaming platforms like Spotify are continuing to grow, according to the IFPI Global Music Report (2019), “total streaming revenues [have] grown [by] 34.0%”, which accounts for “almost half (47%) of global revenue” (para. 3).
[Well] Now that Spotify is dominating the digital music industry, our listening habits are changing. Spotify helps us discover music we have never heard before because of their helpful ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist that is made to suit each user’s unique taste (Yönak, 2019, para. 4). With the abundance of Spotify-created playlists for different “moods,…special occasions” (Yönak, 2019, para. 5) and more, users are encouraged to listen to a variety of songs and through that audiences have become much “more flexible with their listening habits” (Yönak, 2019, para. 16), their indie playlists have especially assisted with helping independent artists grow, which, in the eras of physical albums and downloads, used to be an extremely difficult task (Yönak, 2019, para. 16). Spotify has not just changed what music we consume, but also how we consume music.
Because services like Spotify continue to grow, the way we consume music has changed drastically, from physical albums to downloads and now to streaming; music has never been so accessible, and in Spotify’s case, cheap (Merriman, 2019, para. 3). Since Spotify is so cheap, there is a lot of controversy surrounding artist compensation; When compared with 9 other streaming platforms, Spotify ranked 6th, paying its artists $0.00437 per play (Sanchez, 2018, sec. 7).
Work cited
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Spotify. (2019). Get your first 3 months of Spotify Premium for only $0.99. Retrieved from https://www.spotify.com/au/premium/?_ga=2.43377318.242290920.1558960521-2139061165.1558694874
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