Spotify Hits 12.5 Million Subscribers, Taylor Swift Still Unhappy

Music streaming service Spotify has announced that they now have 12.5 million paying subscribers.

The news came in a blog post by the Swedish company’s CEO Daniel Ek. The number is part of it’s 50 million users overall, making it easily one of the biggest in the growing streaming music business. The point of that blog post was to discuss the brewing controversy surrounding Taylor Swift pulling her music from the service. You might think that Swift’s decision is pretty mundane, but her desire to sell music rather than monetise it with ads or subscriptions brings into question the whole concept of music streaming.

A startling number of people don’t buy music anymore, it’s pretty much come to be expected as a free form of entertainment, with the likes of Vevo on YouTube and all the other music streaming services. There’s also the many millions of illegal downloads to add to declining numbers of music sales. Apple briefly had the answer to combating illegal downloads with iTunes, but figures from their annual report released last month reveal that iTunes is a declining business, with many citing that as the main reason why they bought Beats earlier this year, with their Beats Music service.

It’s certainly true that artists don’t make nearly as much money from streaming as they do downloads or physical releases and so it raises the question of how the music industry, with the technology industry supporting it, can move forward.

Source: Re/Code