Guest post by Robin Davey, indie musician and Head of Music & Film Development at GROWVision.
Before it launched last year, a leaked memo revealed that Spotify were, during their first 12 months operating stateside, projecting 50 million users in the USA alone. With those numbers only hitting 10 million worldwide, with a reportedly small 600,000 paying US subscribers, it appears for now the revolution will not be Spotified.
Spotify’s previous European success seems to have driven their expectations of the US market, however as David Hasslehoffs huge status as a recording artist in Germany proves, some things simply don’t translate. It seems this arrogance and self-reverence that they will be the future of music distribution, is a big factor in their current stumble in this quest to attain dominance.
The insistence from their fledgling days that you joined via Facebook – in a presumed attempt to have peoples listening habits smeared across their pages – only seemed to result in a desperate scramble to figure out how to turn that function off. Sure we want people to know that we are listening to cool shit like the new Spiritualized album or Woody Guthrie classics, but we don’t want them to know we just checked out LMFAO.
Similarly, Spotifys glee at pronouncing they were in bed with the big boys – by up playing their coke partnership, doesn’t really make them seem cool. What Spotify desperately needs is the kids telling you to use the service, not Facebook, or Coke, or major labels. For the time being it seems the word isn’t on the street.
Most people only buy 1.5 albums a year because that is all they want. They don’t need unlimited access to everything. They like the two CDs they play over and over in the car. Or they just like listening to the singles. Albums are dead and have been for a long while. Spotify promises all the tracks from all the artists. People respond by just wanting that one new track by Katy Perry.
Our lives are taken over by technology; we don’t have time to peruse the endless options available to us via Spotify. If we want to hear one track we search it on Youtube, because we know it will be there.
Albums are now a niche market, and Spotify may have vastly over estimated that in the search for world domination. ITunes gives you the track you want, to your phone, for less that the price of a soda. If you see the mammoth plays on youtube videos on artists like Rhianna and Katy Perry it is because kids play them over and over and over again. Just have a teen year come stay at your house for a week and you will know what I mean. Over, and over, and fucking over again.
Spotify doesn’t facilitate this new way to consume as conveniently as other platforms. It looks dull and boring, it looks like it was designed to function like a tax return program. With videos you get pretty pictures, the music industry is now a visual entity, like it or not.
Spotify thinks it is ahead of the curve, but in reality it is desperately lagging.
