Spotify has come under a lot of scrutiny from musicians and industry alike after Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich of Atoms For Peace/Radiohead fame publicly pulled their music from the music streaming service in protest, proclaiming that Spotify was “bad for new music” with a royalties model that pays artists “fuck all.”
Now the Swedish-based digital music platform is looking to sway attention away from its business model by highlighting how it’s positively drawing consumers away from music piracy. How? By publishing a new study on illegal downloading and specifically, how music festivals are causing an increase on music piracy, as the BBC reports.
“Our analysis uncovered some examples of torrents spiking immediately after festival performances,” reads a statement from Spotify about their new study, which concludes that music festivals “increase demand for artists’ music, but that festival-goers mainly sample through unauthorized channels.”
The Spotify study was conducted at the Netherlands’ Stöppelhaene Festival in 2012 and showed that BitTorrent downloads for bands on the bill – including Racoon and Gers Pardoel – “skyrocketed” after they finished their sets, while Spotify reasons that its own streaming counts and legal sales were not affected by the festival appearances. “Our analysis uncovered some examples of torrents spiking immediately after festival performances…” – Spotify
“Explanations for these spikes merits further study, but one intuitive driver is instant gratification,” the report, titled Adventures in The Netherlands, states.
The streaming service also claims that by “examining the impact of holdout strategies on sales and illegal torrent volumes. We found that artists who delayed their release on Spotify suffered higher levels of piracy than those who did not.”
For a sample, they report that One Direction’s Take Me Home – which was released on Spotify without a delay, sold four copies for every one illegal BitTorrent download, whereas Rihanna’s Unapologetic sold one copy per BitTorrent download following a delayed release on Spotify.
In what smacks of scaremongering, the study claims “artists that engage with Spotify see less piracy,” insinuating that if consumers cannot stream the artist from day of release they are more likely to simply go and download it illegally than pay for it through legitimate sources; an argument that promotes Spotify as an album launching platform while ignoring the fact that most musicians would never choose to have their music leaked early by pirates. “We found that artists who delayed their release on Spotify suffered higher levels of piracy than those who did not.” – Spotify
It’s a similar defence that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek used against the criticisms fired at the streaming service by Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich, taking to his Twitter account to proclaim Spotify and its streaming peers “is now a very big revenue source” for artists and industry, while emphasising that its free streaming model showed no real signs of cannibalising traditional revenues like physical sales and paid digital downloads.
Ek pointed to recent successes like Jay-Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail, Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, “and others” (likely Justin Timberlake and Mumford & Sons) which all “did great while pre streaming their music.”
A further statement from Spotify, as reported by TorrentFreak, talks up how the convenience of their free, ad-supported model is helping reduce levels of music piracy as it draws consumers away from torrent websites to its platform.
“Spotify has been surprisingly successful in the Netherlands and our analysis supports previous academic studies which show falling levels of music piracy,” adding that, “14 years after the launch of Napster, it has and always will take a combination of superior legal offerings to the consumer alongside effective public policy to improve the climate for copyright online,” they reason.
But as the Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich protest highlighted, many musicians feel that Spotify’s ‘something is better than nothing’ mission statement isn’t enough to justify its low royalties model. Australian royalties collection agency APRA|AMCOS agrees, emphasising that Spotify’s model for paying artists is not sustainable and “needs to be fixed.”
