Spotify recently confirmed a whopping $250 million expansion round of funding. But with a lot of public heat from high profile musicians questioning whether the music streaming platform is a boom or bust for business, today Spotify is launching a new service, and putting out updated news on the rise in rightsholder payouts, that it hopes will demonstrate that it's not just growing for its own gain.
Spotify Artists Website is a B2B play that will be an interface between the streaming music platform and the musicians/managers that put their content on it, giving them details on how payouts work and other news about the site. On top of that, as befitting a platform, Spotify has teamed up with Next Big Sound to create a dashboard for artists and managers to have real-time access to data about how their music is performing on the site and other details. And it is also confirming that so far in 2013, it has paid out $500 million in royalties to music rightsholders - that is, labels and artists and all others who get a cut of music whenever it is streamed on Spotify's service.
That effectively means that to date, Spotify has paid out over $1 billion in royalties since 2009:
“Our belief has always been that if we can offer fans a listening experience superior to piracy, then they will be happy to pay for it, and in turn we are happy to pay out nearly 70% of all the money we earn in royalties,” Spotify writes today in its opening letter on the new site. “We believe that this is the fair approach to take, and that as we grow we will become an increasingly significant contributor to artists' financial lives.”
The moves today underscore the public (and perhaps also private) pressure that Spotify has been under from some artists who accuse the company of being greedy and not actually all that financially beneficial for those whose music is streamed on it. While Spotify has worked hard to win over some of the most influential artists out there (one big win was getting Metallica on board last year), it has also seen some of these artists pull their music from the service as well.
Although that has seen Spotify knocked a bit in the public eye, it's still the platform to beat against others like Deezer, which has yet to launch in the U.S. but is expected to soon, and Rdio, which has apparently “beautiful” APIs for its partners (a source tells me) but hasn't seen the critical mass of user adoption that Spotify has.
While the news in November was about Spotify securing financing for the future (it is still loss-making as a service), today's news is about Spotify showing that it is minding those on whom it is reliant for its plaform to have any meaning for consumers. You can probably expect that this will also lead, soon, to more product launches as well, both on mobile (it's fastest-growing platform) and on the web - where we have heard that the company is likely to be releasing a web-version API for developers and other third parties soon.
More to come. Refresh for updates.
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