Spotify a loss for musicians?

Recently a new service has emerged from a swedish company Spotify. They offer a gigantic music library available for streaming, a brilliant idea at first and we at Gramtone got on the bus. Through our distributor Phonofile in Norway, we are avaliable on Spotify since last week. Our three releases The Modesty, Tree full of people and PAN are all available. Our coming releases Ralph and Kallocain wants to be published too.

But when talking about the economy, the terms are not particilarly ok for the musicians. First, the income generally is modest, where enormous amounts of artists will share a fairy small cake of money from ads and some paying for subscriptions. Then Spotify shares it 50/50. After that the distributor get 20% and the rest goes into the record company. Since Gramtone has a philosophy of high percentage to our bands, 80-90% of our income, they will get what they can. But as our distributor explained a bit ironically:
“…which will come down to about 0,000000001 euro per play”.
So if an atist is played about one billion times, the will get one euro from Spotify. A revolution? No, but hopefully a complement.

An other thought: Will streaming services really benefit music in the long term? The huge amounts of small labels and independent bands will be forced to work with the few, huge companies that can afford this kind of technology. Now when web publishing is cheap, one can set up their own webshop and work directly with the audience without middlemen, this kind of service maybe puts a gigantic middleman to separate this direct contact. But I might be wrong. It would be cool to hear about Spotifys strategies. I will call them. I also have a few more subjects to talk with them about.

This article (in swedish though) tells about recent development. As usual, the comments are very interesting:
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/musik/den-strommande-musikrevolutionen-1.822297

Edit 8/8 2009: Read the post after our first report from our distributor “Spotify money report”:
http://gramtone.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/176/

Doing the musician thingie

One of the main arguments for file sharing is that musicians don’t suffer from it. The assumption is that only middlemen, the record companies, would disappear. In this assumption it is also said that musicians should do what they always have done.

For some reason this means selling everything but their music: Keyrings, fridge magnets, lighters, t-shirts and posters. The musician as an ambulating peddler of merchandise. This argument is very weak. We musicians should concentrate on creating music, and do what we always have done to earn money, but musicians have first and foremost tried to earn money on their music.

Some bands, of course. Like Kiss for instance, has been rich on their business to sell merchandise. But this is reserved for a tiny number of artists in the world. No one wants to buy a small bands thingies just because they exist.

Music should be the musicians source of income.  I can’t see private copying as a threat, but piracy services can hardly be beneficial for anyone trying to make an artistic living.