Trouble at mill for latest member of “Cloud” family…

Swedish company Spotify has recieved much critical acclaim for its music streaming service over the last few months. With a new round of investment valuing it at $250 million, the start-up goes from strength to strength.

I’m an unashamedly huge fan of spotify, which (for those of you who don’t know) is an itunes-esq desktop music client that uses a mixture of P2P/Direct streaming to place a library of over 3.5 millions tracks at the user’s disposal … virtually instantly. I’m not alone in this opinion either, and spotify has been widely welcomed, both by an internet community sick & tired of fighting the outdated business models and practices of Industry labels, and by proponents of the “Cloud” computing model that has gained so much media focus recently.

Perhaps the music labels too realise that spotify is a way of angling across the current of the increasingly powerful anti-copyright lobby  ? The significant shares owned by labels such as Sony would seem to support this theory.

Other than its continued(and increasingly conspicious) absence in the U.S. then, all is rosey in the Spotify camp.

Be warned though, those with their ears to the ground may predict the honeymoon period coming to an abrupt end in the near future, as questions arise from the Artist community that strike at the heart of one the product’s principal selling points.

Swedish Artist Magnus Uggla accused spotify of being “too good to be true!”, and branded it as dishonest. This attack is owed, apparently, to the expectation among artists that as the music labels own large stakes in the service, they will be paid a good rate for their music. Infact, Uggla described his first six month earnings statement from spotify as “less than a Busker would earn in one day”.

The number of  artists who subscribe to this view is, as yet, relatively small. However, if Uggla’s sentiment were to gain significant traction amongst the worldwide artist community, spotify could face real questions about its strategy and future.

I can’t say who I blame more in this scenario: spotify or the respective music labels. Whichever it is though, please, Please, PLEASE consider a different payment scheme which includes paying artists on the basis of rising stock value. Or perhaps even pay those that opt in in spotify stock ?!

Cheers,

Hugo [as reported on torrentfreak.com and techcrunch.com]