Spotify is the world’s most popular on-demand music streaming service, with around 75 million active users every month. It’s based around the concept of creating and sharing playlists. Like other streaming services, Spotify allows its users to access content via the internet, streaming music directly from Spotify’s servers rather than downloading it locally.
Spotify costs £9.99 per month (or £4.99 if your a student!) this covers the copyright costs of streaming the music and pays the royalties to the artists. However, it has been argued that these royalties aren’t enough, a Guardian report suggests that the average payment a signed artist gets after their label takes its share is a mere $0.001128. Meaning they need approximately 1000 streams to get just $1. This had led to high profile artists like Taylor Swift removing all their music from the service.
I believe Spotify is a great service for reducing piracy, being able to stream music as much as you want for a single fee per month is much cheaper than having to pay each time you want a new song. Do you think streaming services have helped reduce piracy?
Network Society and the Media 
I must say thank you for explaining Spotify! It is a service everyone talks about but not one I’ve invested in. It is an interesting concept but you can understand why artist like Taylor Swift have taken their music down. The reason they are as successful as they are is because they SELL their music to make a profit. As much as they might enjoy singing or be good at what they do, the fact remains that the music industry is a business.
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I use Spotify basically every day. I do think it is a bit unfair that artists get paid so little for their work. It is a good thing that Spotify is available for free, but it’s not convinient for the musicians. But at the end of the day, it’s their decision to put or not their music on this platform, so they are the ones who decide if it is a good deal or not
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I also use Spotify every day. However, I feel that artists should take it as a platform for them to promote themselves and to promote their songs. Mainly for new artists, this platform can be really helpful.
For artists like Taylor Swift, I personally found a bit arrogant from her this decision to remove all her songs in Spotify. In terms of money, I believe all the famous artists, including her, have other thousand ways to earn money to “pay their bills”.
And yeah, for me this kind of streaming service has helped a lot reducing piracy. I used to download songs from 4Shared. Now, I feel a lot better using a platform that I’m fairly paying for using and even having access to better quality music.
Very interesting post and points of view!!!
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I don’t really think streaming services has helped reduce privacy. If you think about it, many people will always find a way to get music if its free. Many argue that music artists already have a ton of money so why would they need more ? Nonetheless I think spotify is a good streaming service.
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I’m not really sure about piracy in Western countries, but in Easter Europe, where I’m from, piracy is very developed. There is a great number of websites where you can get a song or an album you wish for free, and that is why streaming services are not very popular in that part of Europe. Have they helped reduce privacy? It really depends.
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