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Universal Reportedly Wants Spotify To Scale Back Its Free Streaming
An anonymous reader writes with news that Universal CEO Lucian Grainge is not a big fan of free streaming music. "Spotify might have bent over backwards to lift restrictions on its free streaming service a couple of years ago, but at least one music label appears eager to turn back the clock. Financial Times sources understand that Universal is using licensing negotiations to squeeze Spotify and demand more limits for those who don't pay up, such as restricting the amount of time they can play tunes in a given month. The publisher isn't confirming anything, but CEO Lucian Grainge has lately been chastising the free, ad-based streaming model — it's no secret that he would like more paying customers. According to one insider, Universal believes that Spotify is directly hurting sales at stores like iTunes."
Or, you know, maybe the insiders are morons who believe in their unrealistic assumptions about just how much they're going to sell.
Because, you know, according to the copyright idiots, more value than the GDP of the US or any other country is lost to piracy.
Maybe the pay-for-play digital music market is exceedingly finite, and your wishful thinking of getting billions of dollars for doing nothing is complete crap?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
All the labels will soon want their own streaming service where they control they songs played, ads you listen to and what your favorite songs are. If you search for an artist not on their label, you will not be able to hear it and it will direct you to their own music you might like.
The middle class income keeps stagnating and prices keep going up. The first thing to go is entertainment.
Universal believes that Spotify is directly hurting sales at stores like iTunes.
Universal's belief is most certainly correct to some extent, but is that a bad thing? True fans, I think, would find other ways of supporting the artists they love, and I'd guess the ones who do nothing but stream wouldn't have spent more money on it in the first place.
Because... universal has hosted every single song in its library on Youtube.... for free.
And I don't have to deal with some shitty streaming service deciding what it is going to play next. I can just play the exact songs I want.
And those ads on youtube? Well, adblock kills them. I try to keep adblock off if I want to support the person that posts the video... but if I either don't care or I actively want them to make no money... then adblock is happening.
Here is the thing, Universal... the CD is dead. The Record is dead.
What did you people do before records? You existed and your people made money.
I know they were on the radio... I know they were doing concerts. I know they were singing in advertising. I know they were getting cast in movies or used by movies to do singing bits.
That is what you're going back to.
Because the CD is dead.
Spotify etc are at best like the radio of old. And the radio didn't charge listeners to listen. You tune in and listen. Put an ad in there if that makes you happy. What money you get is going to come by taking a percentage of that revenue.
If that isn't a lot... don't know what to tell you. The ad companies are rating the VALUE of your listeners as that amount of money.
If reaching those people with an ad is worth 2 cents then your music is likely not worth a great deal more than that.
Get over it.
Find something else for your artists to do to make money besides make records. Records are dead.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Is it too much to ask?
Whilst I support what Spotify do on principle (I havent pirated a single song since spotify came out, although I had already started buying my most loved stuff on iTunes) it does represent a pretty bad deal for artists. I've had a fair few thousand listens on spotify, not bad for a small band, but haven't seen more than a few measly cents off this.If this translated to, say, a hundred sales on iTunes, well it'd be somethng. There has to be a middle ground where artists can get paid (I'd love to write you guys music for a living), but lets music be free.
I ended up putting my stuff on torrents, beause screw it, if I'm not going to be paid, I might as well at least get some exposure out of it. But it'd be nice to sell a few albums.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
...what will directly hurt sales will be if Universal, etc, goes and does crap like this...
More and more people will just start downloading music again and they won't get jack, or squat.
You keep asking this and the answer is YES: open source is all about the code, and not your misogynist 1950's hillbilly mindset. Get with the times or GTFO.
As if anyone needed Spotify to get free music. Who the fuck still pays for music? You don't even need P2P anymore, you can find anything you want on youtube and download with appropriate browser extensions. Kiss my ass!
attacking and thwarting non-U.S services, to favor the U.S economy and foreign want or dependency on U.S services. This action will grow, and eventually U.S labels will be recommended to remove their top-selling artists from f.ex. Spotify.
We shouldn't pay all those artists and platforms so much, a couple percents are already too much.
We're so much more important.
If only people would directly give all their money to us!
Should sexist opensource developers have their projects censored or removed?
More to the point: Should someone else's project hosting be required to host a viewpoint that they disagree with? Should a developer be guaranteed publicity and a podium to voice unpopular opinions? No and no.
Like Rap? How the hell do they make money off that? Tours, tours and tours. Certainly not CD/Mp3 sales. They walk around with millions. Where the hell do they get that sort of money?
90% of the music on radio is OLD. Anything new has got to be radio friendly. Music is dead.
The old model for music distribution:
1. A song gets played on the radio.
2. A listener hears the song and would like to listen to it on demand, so they head down to the album store and buy a CD or record.
3. Listener pays for product, leaves happy! Music!
4. Distribution label PROFITS!!! (though cut has to go to artist, agent, CD/record production, etc.. ).
The new model for music distribution:
1. Listener hears artist's music on Youtube, can play on demand for free, can contribute to artist directly!
2. ??? - sound of crickets chirping -
Not seeing the need for big labels anymore myself. They are trying to coerce money out of a system that is rapidly realizing this new reality. Good luck with that!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
why isn't universal getting the same cut for paid or free streaming?
As I explained in a comment to a previous story, US copyright law provides for a compulsory license to stream sound recordings at a fixed royalty so long as a service resembles radio more than a jukebox. Pandora, for example, selects songs in a similar style to the artist whose name you key in and is therefore not considered an "interactive service" that substitutes for purchases.
Make me something I want and I might use it.
Until then fight over stuff I don't and won't use, you're still not gaining me as a customer.
#brokenbusinessmodel.
Buy art from artists! Pirate the shit out of big media, or just DON'T BUY. End the monopoly of ideas and information. The age of awaikining is upon us. Rise up and demand what is rightly ours. Ideas are not property!!!
What about the concept of pricing iTunes movies and songs more fairly and to a point where people won't bother to pirate them. The prices of music and films are distorted, too expensive upon a perceived reality distortion film of the medias conglomerates and the market is maintained by customer intimidation and political pressure instead of the law of the offer and demand...things have to change. Thing is with prices by the cents of music and movies, iTunes and the likes could dominate the landscape of entertainment and be almost the sole exclusive providers. Going to the movies, and buying physical media for entertainment is an obsolete and dead concept, certainly not ecological and a big waste of natural resources and money.
I don't know anyone who has pirated music since Spotify and the similar companies came about. Which means the companies are surely making more than before, at least in ad revenue.
Let them pull their catalog and watch piracy go up even more. The days where media companies get to pretend there is a finite supply of their product is over. The market knows that it costs basically nothing to distribute now. They're attempting to charge more than when there was a need for a physical product which needed a theater/cinema, packaging, shipping to a store, and to take up floor space in that store. Their product does not hold the same scarcity it once did. If they can't accept that, they're going to go out of business..
If they want to compete now, they need to price accordingly. These media companies can scream death of creativity due to piracy all they want, people created and performed art long before these vampiric companies existed and they will create and perform long after they're gone.
PS: If I were them, I would buy up the distribution channels which at home people use to access my product and put a chokepoint there in order to make my product scarce again.
Oh, wait, they're doing exactly that... Comcast and TimeWarner are both owned by massive media companies.
It it is true that corporations are legally people, does that mean that when you the band breaks up, the corp dies and the copyright death clock starts ticking?
Universal doesn't like the fact that they can't dictate what crap music they can force upon you. Spotify gives people choices from their catalog and these choices don't match Universal's "profit centers". Obviously the customers are "stupid" for indicating a preference.
The labels want to kill PCM because there's no good way to do DRM on it.
Before CD, a good copy had to be made by the record label. After CD anyone could have a pure copy of the PCM-encoded audio. Even with the awesome FLAC's from Ponomusic anyone can make a copy and distribute it anywhere, because it's PCM inside the FLAC.
The labels want Apple to help achieve this, and I think they might try to do it with the new encoding method MQA.
If MQA delivers high quality audio at lower data rates than PCM, and provides DRM in the decoder, as it is reported, the labels would happily put everything out in this new MQA encodings. And since it fits into the existing file containers like FLAC, they can confuse everyone and sell these new incompatible FLAC's that will be much harder to copy and bootleg.
Apple's play is to put MQA DAC's right into the headphone, putting both DRM and sound quality into the headphone model, not the iDevice.
Just my opinion here. Part of the reason the labels aren't jumping at releasing 24bit files like PonoMusic and HDTracks is because they have no DRM (copy protection).
As long as Spotify is paying the licensed amount, Universal has no say in it.. until the next contract negotiations.
(I generally don't use ANY of these streaming services, btw.. because of the ads and limited amount of skips.. in THEORY I'd love to find a lot of new similar music to what I have, but I seem to usually already own the various things it thinks are similar to the bands I choose.)
Universal believes that Spotify is directly hurting sales at stores like iTunes.
I hate Apple and iTunes and won't touch it with a ten foot pole. Therefore iTunes is directly hurting sales.
Youtube (ok, Google) pays Universal for each view...
If you wonder, how much it is: GEMA (German MAFIAA) demanded 2 digit cent per view (!!!) which pissed off youtube to a point they said, nope, we better not play anything covered by GEMA in Germany at all.