With UMG leading the charge to reshape the music industry into a more label-friendly form, 2023 may, with hindsight, go down as the year before everything changed. Whatever lies ahead though, new models will take time to deliver benefits. Music subscriptions are therefore going to remain the bedrock of music rightsholder revenues for the foreseeable future. So, it is a good thing that music subscriptions had such a good year in 2023. As of Q3 2023, there were 713.4 million music subscribers globally, which was 90 million up on the 623.4 million one year earlier in Q3 2022. This matters f ..read more

Spotify released a blog post laying out how it wants the world to understand its new two-tier royalty system. The positioning is clear, leading with the statement that it will drive “an additional $1 billion toward[s] emerging and professional artists” and the PR push included several supporting quotes from the independent sector (with no major label quote to be seen). Positioning-wise, this is certainly now a case of ‘where it started’ (reverse Robin Hood) and ‘how it is going (everyone is a winner). Of course, the truth lies somewhere in between, but we are getting to a better plac ..read more

With two-tier licensing now a thing, it is time to focus the discussion on how to add new components to the DSP ecosystem that will help long-tail artists continue to thrive in this brave new world. There are many positives that two-tier licensing will bring (helping mid-tier artist remuneration, attaching an appropriate premium to lean-forward listening, etc.) even if the streaming fraud efforts will likely soon be offset by bot farms increasing their minimum streams thresholds. But the potential downturn to long-tail artist income is a very real prospect. Not only could artist subscript ..read more

With the dust still far from settled on the UMG / Deezer streaming royalty proposal, something even bigger is coming: Spotify is turning the concept into reality in Q1 2024. The behind-the-scenes conversations have been ongoing for some time, but the details were stated publicly on panels at last week’s ADE conference, meaning that the information is now firmly in the public domain. Obviously, nothing is official at this stage, so consider this ‘as reported’ information. Even if the final details end up varying, what is clear is that two-tier licensing is about to become a reality. Things are ..read more

Streaming has come a long way since its days as a pure music service for super fans. Spotify’s announcement that it is making 15 monthly audiobook hours available to premium subscribers is simply the latest step in a journey that has seen streaming become the 21st century’s take on radio. This has been achieved with the steady addition of non-music content (podcasts and audiobooks especially) and a growing emphasis on programmatic lean back consumption. As with all change, when it sits in an extended period of transformation, its immediate impact is often under-recognised. Audio ..read more

Kantar, a survey vendor, has been getting some attention by passing off consumer data as an actual measure of subscribers and suggesting that the music subscriber base actually declined in Q1 2022. It said the same in Q4 2021, but 2021 was a spectacular year for music subscriber growth, with the global base of subscribers growing by 118.8 million in 2021 – the largest ever increase in a single year – to reach 586 million. Of course, it would be obtuse to suggest that all is rosy in the world of digital subscriptions. After all, the attention recession has slowed growth and the actual ..read more

It has been a couple of weeks that Spotify would be glad to forget – if it could. Although many of the arguments have been emotionally charged and the debate says as much about people’s political beliefs as it does business strategy, it is indisputable that there is a lot at stake for Spotify. Podcasters are its big bet on the future, music artists are the current bet that pays the bills. Both constituencies need to be kept happy, but can they both be kept happy enough and at the same time? Spotify’s big-future podcast vision has been sold to investors, divesting or censoring Joe Rogan would s ..read more

The symbolism behind Spotify’s support of Neil Young removing his music from the platform, rather than Joe Rogan’s podcast being removed for peddling vaccine misinformation was inescapable. For many, this was a highly public test of whether Spotify put audio or music first, and audio won. For a company that still makes more than 95% of its revenue from music, that is a big call. But, of course, in this particular instance we are talking about a catalogue music artist versus a superstar frontline audio creator. Rogan is one of Spotify’s biggest audio bets, and audio is Spotify’s biggest st ..read more

MIDiA’s annual music subscriber market shares report is now available here (see below for more details of the report). Here are some of the key findings. The global base of music subscribers continues to grow strongly with 523.9 million music subscribers at the end of Q2 2021, which was up by 109.5 million (26.4%) from one year earlier. Crucially, this was faster growth than the prior year. There is a difference between revenue and subscribers – with ARPU deflators, such as the rise of multi-user plans and the growth of lower-spending emerging markets – but growth in monetised users ..read more

Spotify reported another strong quarter in Q3 2020, with subscriber growth up 27% year-on-year (YoY) and ad-supported user growth up 21%. Spotify continues to set the pace for the global streaming market and has demonstrated that streaming has proven resilient to lockdown. (Spotify finished the quarter with 144 million subscribers, just above MIDiA’s 143 million forecast – we maintain our end of year forecast for 154 million.) Further evidence of Spotify’s lockdown resilience is that global consumption hours surpassed pre-COVID levels and that churn levels fell. However, Spotify’s premium ..read more