How Spotify Can Become Profitable

journovampire writes: Spotify just posted another big net loss, but it can become profitable with some specific changes according to one analyst. He suggests the following three options: Cut royalty costs to the music industry, freeze expenditure year-on-year, and what seems like the least likely option, somehow make free users pay $1 every three months. He points out: "if Spotify’s current free user base just paid €1/£1/$1 every three months, it would be a profitable company."

Comments

If...

[Anonymous Coward]

If everybody in my country gave me just five cents per year, I'd be rich. What does that prove?

$1 a month

[Tyrannosaur]

it sounds cheap and easy for people to pay $1 a month, but personally there is a large bump in commitment as soon as I submit my monetary information. This often keeps me from doing still fairly inexpensive things because I don't want that commitment

Re:$1 a month

[bloodhawk]

Recurring expenses don't bother me. Trusting a company like Spotify to handle them securely and professionally however does. To many of these companies consider secure handling of your details as something that is distant second in importance to actually getting your money. Recurring payments mean long term trust, I simply don't have that in such a company.

Re:It not very hard

[viperidaenz]

You mean charge everyone $5 per month, because changing a free service to a paid one could well cut the user base by a factor of 15.

Re:It not very hard

[jonsmirl]

I'm still trying to figure out how collecting royalties on songs where everyone is dead is going to incentivize them to make more music. Maybe we should reconsider these rules giving copyright to corporations for 200 years.

Re:Pay the musicians even less?!?!

[jedidiah]

...except the problem with all of that is this is being driven by idiot savant musicians that don't understand that there's a money grubbing middle man in between them and Spotify. What the artist gets and what Spotify actually pays are two different things.

And that's not even getting into the problem of assigning a reasonable value to a single impression.

Re:It not very hard

[PopeRatzo]

1. Many musicians have families and work to create an inheritance for them. If there is no copyright past death there is no inheritance.

So, when I die, can I still have the company I work for continue to pay my family for the work I did when I was alive?

Copyright laws that extend beyond the death of the artist are an abomination.

2. Music corporations are not going to pour millions into a rising star if they can get no return if the artist dies.

If "music corporations" stop pouring "millions" into a rising star, nothing of value will be lost. It doesn't cost "millions" to make and release a recording any more. Those days are long gone.

Re:Pay the musicians even less?!?!

[PopeRatzo]

We are going to need compulsory licensing and reasonable payments to right holders.

Not to "right holders", but to artists.

Limit copyrights on recorded music to 25 years and don't let them be assignable to anyone but the artist (maybe a spouse). Not children, not publishing companies, not record labels.

If I listen to Charlie Parker records, why should I be paying license fees to anyone? Every single person associated with that recording and the music therein is dead. Earlier tonight, I was listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Al Haig's recording of "Shaw 'Nuff" which was recorded 70 years ago today. Why shouldn't that entire recording be in the public domain? I'll pay a company to stream it, no problem. But why should any "rights" money change hands?

https://youtu.be/1IuZNbdwAk8