WITH SO MUCH competition out there, it’s difficult for a new or upcoming band to be noticed on music streaming services. Yet if you’re on Spotify, playlists could be the quickest way to being discovered according to its CEO.
Spotify’s CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek took to Q&A site Quora to answer a few questions about the service, and concerned how new bands can be discovered on Spotify. The quickest way according to Ek is to get friends to include your songs on their playlists.
“The easiest way today is to convince people to put it in their playlists and share it if they like it,” he said. “Both of those channels are massive and they can lead to more promotion through our viral chart, through Discover Weekly, to being featured as a new release, etc”.
Spotify is a democratic system in the sense that if people really like it, and the ‘vital signs’ as we call them are good, then the system will figure it out and spread the word.
He also gave his reasons as to how the company gained a foothold in the first place. One was starting in his home country Sweden instead of the US as it was a narrow market.
Other reasons included working with the music industry to launch it and the amount of time the company spent on developing latency, the speed in which things worked, saying ”obsessing over small details can sometimes make all the difference.”
Also, people’s tastes in music aren’t as broad as they would like to think they are. Instead, people are more likely to listen to music that matches what they’re doing like going for a run or sleeping.
“The truth is, in your actual listening habits, most of us are very specific about what we want to listen to, but not by genre. Our habits and moments are what define our listening more than anything else,” he said.
People want one kind of music when they’re getting ready to go out on the weekend, another for dinner at home, something else for working out, sleeping, and so on. And this ‘breaking down’ of genre barriers opens up the way to much better, more interesting, and more relevant programming – and music discovery.
The other major issue that arises with any talk about Spotify is paying artists and how streaming is harming them. According to Ek, the big picture is the “music industry is growing again” and is “changing as it moves from an ownership model to an access model”.
Look, we pay the great majority of our revenue back to the music industry, And as we grow, that revenue is really making a difference. Many people don’t realise that the music industry was in decline throughout all the download years (with a one year exception in which it was basically flat). Now finally after years and years of decline, music is growing again, streaming is behind the growth in music and Spotify is behind the growth in streaming.
Spotify is said to be closing in on 30 million paying subscribers, having hit 28 million at the end of 2015, according to the Financial Times. The most recent figured it released back in June said it had 75 million active users.
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