And people discover artists they’ve never heard before “16bn times a month”.
“Last year we added 76,000 artists to our playlists for the very first time. And another new stat: “Today, there are over 60,000 new tracks delivered to our platform every single day,” says Erlich. And now news! Spotify is launching in new countries in the coming days, although the details are coming a little later in the presentation.ġ1.25 EST: Next up is Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s chief content and advertising business officer, who quickly hands over to co-heads of music Marian Dicus and Jeremy Erlich, and a segment on Spotify’s playlists. It’s really both a challenge and a great opportunity.”ġ1.20 EST: Ek repeats Spotify’s ‘giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art’ corporate mission – which, keen mathematicians will have twigged, may be only a fiftieth of the creators uploading stuff to its platform. “I believe that by 2025 we could have as many as 50 million creators on our platform, whose art is enjoyed by a billion users around the world. Spotify had eight million creators on its platform at the end of 2020, double the total in 2018. Spotify paid out more than $5bn in royalties in 2020, he adds. In 2019, total revenue of the recording industry was just over $20bn, and more than half that revenue, $11.4bn, came from streaming,” says Ek. “With streaming we’ve helped the global music industry go from contraction to growth. This means that meaningful income is flowing to more artists than ever before.”ġ1.18 EST: This is Ek making his pitch for Spotify as a helper for artists and the music industry alike. So it’s not just the possibility that more artists can be heard by a global audience. By comparison, in 2020, 1.8 million albums were released on Spotify in the US, and six times as many albums represented 98% of the streams for these releases. “20 years ago the music industry was a pretty restrictive club… Back in 2002, just over 30,000 albums were released in the US, and only 8,000 sold more than 1,000 copies, representing more than 98% of sales of new releases. The amount of music you could discover back then was limited by shelf space and floor space by the physical distribution capabilities of music companies, by the personal preferences of a radio DJ and of course by where you lived and how much you could afford to spend.”ġ1.15 EST: “More creators are creating and succeeding than ever before,” continues Ek. I understand the nostalgia, I get it… but looking back, what really strikes me is how limiting it was. People love to look back fondly on the record industry of two decades ago, the era of the record store and FM radio. We’re moving forward, not turning the clock back.
And who won’t just follow their career, but will sustain it.”Įk describes the last decade and a half as “an audio renaissance… and what it is not is a restoration. It’s connecting listeners with the audio they love, and connecting creators with the fans who’ll find meaning in their art. We still believe in audio first, we still want to be the soundtrack to your life… Our platform is wired for connection. “15 years later, we are more committed than ever. Piracy was killing it,” he says in the historical segment.
“In 2006, the music industry was collapsing. We’ll be updating this post in reverse-chronological order during the event, then flipping it back to chronological afterwards.ġ1.10 EST: The stream kicked off with clips of artists saying how much they love Spotify (surprise!) before CEO Daniel Ek’s introduction.
#Spotify for artists full#
Stick with us, and you will too (and you can watch the full thing via the embedded video below). Spotify is holding an online ‘Stream On’ event today, to announce… well, we’re not quite sure what the company is announcing, but we’re expecting some new product features updates on how its tools for artists and ‘two-sided marketplace’ is evolving plenty of podcasts talk and… well, we’ll find out.