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Guest post by Chris Castle of Music Tech SolutionsMTS readers will recall my post on what I called “Ethical Props” (OK, OK, not the best moniker I’ve ever come up with, but you’ll get the idea if you read the “Ethical Pool” post). The concept is an expansion of the micropayments that TenCent (and lots of other sites in other businesses) permits on its music platform. The question presented was whether Spotify would adopt a similar structure and how they would treat artists. That’s a serious question, by the way.It turns out that the issue came up on Spotify’s latest earnings call, and was foreshadowed by Daniel Ek’s interest in Facebook’s Libra currency. Stuart Dredge at Music Ally reports that the subject did come up:Earlier this month, Spotify’s chief premium business officer Alex Norström hintedthat the company was exploring the idea of new ways for artists to make money on its service: “You can add stuff on top like micro-payments, a la carte, prepaid plans for different contexts…”Ek was asked about direct monetisation such as tipping during the earnings call today. “It’s something that we’re overall interested in. We definitely look at it as part of the scope of the types of marketplace tools that you can expect,” he said. “You should expect us to try a lot of things… it certainly could be very interesting specifically for a lot of artists…”First…does anyone know what a “chief premium business officer” is? I’m not familiar with that one, although my best is that they probably office next to the “chief exposure business officer.”Quick review–Mr. Ek’s buddies at TenCent have made quite a business of “tipping” which explains why Ek is interested:How Spotify will approach the subject has a lot to do with how they perceive their artist relations problems. The chances are good that Spotify don’t think they have an artist relations problem.But they do. As I often say, if screw ups were Easter eggs, Daniel Ek would be the Easter Bunny, hopping from one to another until he had picked them all up in his basket. (A nondenominational Easter bunny, of course.)He could either pass through 100% of the “tip” which would make it “Ethical” as we define it, or he could take a cut like TenCent which wouldn’t.The dreaded Apple is already in the act to a degree:[TenCent’s] micropayments reportedly influenced Apple to change its in-app purchase policies, which make a good guideline for putting the “ethical” into an Ethical Prop:“Apps may enable individual users to give a monetary gift to another individual without using in-app purchase, provided that (a) the gift is a completely optional choice by the giver, and (b) 100% of the funds go to the receiver of the gift. However, a gift that is connected to or associated at any point in time with receiving digital content or services must use in-app purchase.”(That’s section 3.2.1(vii) in Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines for those reading along at home.)So watch this space – let’s see what choices they make.
