A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following blog post which I forgot to actually publish. Today I woke up to an article in Wired stating that more than 200 small music labels have taken their music out of Spotify and Rdio. It reminded me of this post, so here it is, late but never more relevant:

I’m a big fan of music subscription services. While they became all the rage in the US just recently, Iv’e been using a few of them for years now.
But this week I got a few big disappointments.  A few of my favorite artists came out with new albums and to my surprise I couldn’t find them in any of the services including Spotify and Rdio. The artists I’m talking about are Coldplay, Kaskade and Florence + The Machine.
Now, it’s true that it might be just a coincidence and I hope it is. Because the other option might suggest a change that will make services like Spotify end up like Netflix – The “Rewind” service for music.

But if Spotify is growing like crazy, why we even talk about such an option?
Because under this growth, there are still some big problems and questions that the streaming services and the music industry as a all need to solve. Some examples are:
If you are not a very big name artist, you are simply not going to make money from people playing your music with these services. And if you are a big name like Coldplay, you can actually decide to put your new album on iTunes only for a few months, get the big money there, and than push it to streaming and hope to get some more.
And what if you are a small band? Well, the big point that the streaming services are fighting for is that they allow for people to discover your music. That people won’t buy your albums, but if they can listen to them for free they might discover you and you will make money on touring. The problem with this is the statistics behind the service. For example, on Spotify, more than 90% of the songs played are the same 10% of songs mostly coming from big artists (Worth to note that this is the exact opposite from the stats behind Pandora).
Now, this might change a bit now that Spotify is integrated with the new Facebook Open Graph which allows for better music discovery, but we will need to wait and see.

So will we see more artists and labels take their music off the platform or will subscription will become the main way we consume music int he future? Tell me what you think.