'People's listening habits have changed - and they're not going to change back,' he wrote. If Spotify's $2 billion in payments aren't 'flowing to the creative community in a timely and transparent way, that's a big problem,' he said, adding that the company will work with the industry to solve it.īut, he continued, the days of multiple artists selling many millions of albums every year are over. She let some of her music remain on other free services such as YouTube and Soundcloud.Įk said stories from artists and songwriters about receiving little or no money from streaming frustrate him as well. 'I just don't agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free,' she said in an interview with Yahoo. Spotify complied with Swift's request to remove her songs, and she later explained that she's unwilling to contribute her life's work to an experiment that doesn't fairly compensate writers, producers, artists and other music creators. Last week, Swift pulled her entire catalog of music off Spotify just as her latest album, '1989,' had the largest sales week for any record since 2002. That speed of change and the uncertainty about the format has caused high-profile artists such as Swift, Pink Floyd and Radiohead's Thom Yorke to criticize the burgeoning model. In the first six months of 2014, streaming services accounted for 27 percent of industry sales - up from 20 percent in the same period the year before - and helped offset declines in music download sales.īut the rapid ascent of streaming music has come too quickly for payment models to stay apace for all people in the sound-recording food chain. Streaming music is one of the top sources of music sales and is growing briskly, while sales from physical music (CDs) and digital downloads are in decline, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The post by the low-key Ek highlights the friction in the music industry as distribution and sales fundamentally morph from selling ownership of music - be it a record, a CD or a digital download - to selling access to music.

Spotify ceo to musicians