More and more, Spotify is the way people hear what I make. It’s certainly how I listen to music: streaming Daniel Tiger songs in the car to get my kids to stop fighting; making a playlist of Mavis Staples solo songs after reading her biography; even playing my own music, over and over, trying to remember how a song goes while prepping for a rare mid-pandemic show.
At its best, Spotify is an elegant tool—a conduit between artist and art and listener. But at its worst, it’s a bad actor in a worse industry that historically treats artists miserably. Spotify is a hero, having brought new money to artists and labels when the music industry had hit rock bottom in the mid-2010s. It is a villain, paying pitifully low royalties per stream to artists, while the rich people in the industry—whether label heads, or Spotify executives, or famous artists—somehow still get richer.
Even though the small number of streaming services have access to almost every bit of music that’s ever been recorded, and even though they strike near-monopolistic deals with near-monopolistic major labels, there isn’t quite enough money for anyone to make a good profit on streaming music. Too many middlemen take their share, and there’s a limit to how much people are willing to pay for music now that the internet exists. The biggest tech companies have other ways to make money: Apple sold music by the song before starting a streaming service but always generated most of its earnings off hardware; Google has a seemingly infinite array of mysterious revenue sources. Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. So it’s been turning to podcasts. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts—Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these—Spotify gets a new place to run ads. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business.
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