That's because the major labels recognized they had Spotify over a barrel. The bulk of that revenue isn't going to the artists.

Indie artists are probably the worst off, making something like $0.003 per stream. So a modestly successful independent artist with 100,000 monthly listeners is making $300/month or $3600 a year. So why do they bother? Well, you get mixed in with more notable acts so maybe someone googles you and finds your bandcamp, where you can capture 80% of the revenue. I know artists who made more money selling cassettes on bandcamp in one month than they did on Spotify the whole year.

Benn Jordan (makes music as The Flashbulb) on YouTube just made a video about this. One of his recent albums made more money in its first weekend on bandcamp than a promoted album did on Spotify in a month.

This is probably why they're shoving podcasts down everyone's throats. I don't expect the plan will succeed, because if it does the labels will just squeeze them for more money. But at least they're trying.

They're trying to destroy the podcast environment by building a walled garden and not competing by building a good player. It's horrible, I hope they fail.

The main executive in charge of bringing on podcast left during the layoffs earlier this month. So I would be willing to bet they are not seeing the ROI they expected.

I would stop giving tens of millions of dollars to podcast personalities to start.

They lost $250 million this quarter. Those podcast deals are minor in the grand scheme of losing money.

Then whats the value add? There is nothing unique to Spotify.

To me, its the opposite of value-add. I've seen this play out with Amazon.They keep adding all these services that I do not value and I have to use Prime. Then they keep raising the rate of prime. How about you provide me a base service (item delivery) and keep your music streaming, video streaming, etc as something else.

In that case, seems like their only other option is to raise rates slower but they are still required to raise the rates because they are not making money and not growing. Raising rates and not adding new features will likely reverse their growth. How would you feel if there were price hikes yet nothing has changed or improved? Again there is no real value add in your scenario so the customers can jump to a competing service and suffer no real loss. The podcasts are clearly helping to solve growing problem and thats at least a little bit better than not making money AND not growing.

The value they have is music recommendation and spotify wrapped. Apple recently added their karaoke mode.Tidal has great quality. There are plenty of new music related features that they can add. I, as a consumer, sign up for music streaming to stream music. I don't value a podcast moat, so I use a competing service that is more inline with my needs.

Plenty of services are rising their prices and lowering their offerings (HBO, I am looking at you). Which is also trash, and I am allowed to make value judgements on those as well.

If you love podcasts, and need your Joe Rogan, then spotify is for you.

Sadly, Spotify is both hurting the podcast ecosystem AND a crappy podcast player -- much worse than PocketCasts, OverCast, or even Apple Podcasts if I'm being honest.

It's like the executives decided to force podcasts into a music player. All the podcast value adds like gap trimming, adjustable playback speed, slight rewind on restarts that last longer than a few seconds... they've omitted.

And follow that up with a couple of hundred million to FC Barcelona...!

That still gives them $3 billion to run the business and turn a profit. Seems like that should be doable.

I have no idea. Perhaps use its enormous market share to negotiate lower fees? Or pay more podcasters and turn it into satellite radio 2.0, which is what appears to be happening.

Either way it shouldn't take a decade fo figure out, they are not curing disease or developing spacecraft. How did Tower Records and HMV do it? They didnt have Spotify's monopoly position and had to compete against Walmart and Best Buy.

>How did Tower Records and HMV do it? They didnt have Spotify's monopoly position and had to compete against Walmart and Best Buy.

Probably forcing people to buy 15-20$ cds when all people wanted was that one 99 cent song.

The old music business thrived on vinyl then 8 track then cassettes then CDs.

$15 in 1985 is about $40 adjusted for inflation and they convinced people to buy the same music multiple times. To even find that music you liked enough to buy multiple times too you probably bought 5 albums that you thought sucked.

I can remember as a kid in the 80s too that my father and all his friends easily had 500+ vinyl albums on display in their homes. Then those started collecting dust as they bought hundreds of cds.

It is just so different now. Imagine spending $40 bucks for 10 songs and have no idea if you will even like them. That is a totally different racket.

What would happen overnight if Spotify and record labels broke up?

Spotify would lose a huge portion of its userbase (nearly all) surely

but more interestingly, record labels lose that revenue (which I'm guessing has to be one of their main sources of income for their finished product: the artist's music)

How is Spotify not able to negotiate a deal better than 70% given that leverage?

It would take a couple minutes for those Spotify users to change to apple/google/Amazon/tidal/whatever for their music wants/needs.

The computers and software that delivers the music is the commodity with no moat, the music is copyrighted and the record label is the only place to get it from.