Since Spotify burst on to the scene, it has become the top music streaming platform worldwide. It’s no surprise – the app runs extremely smoothly, has almost every artist you could ever want, and is (mostly) free. But, there’s still a market that the Swedish market giant hasn’t tapped into yet.
Currently the only place where “bedroom” producers can be found is on Soundcloud. Even though the company is suffering massive losses, it’s still the only place where anyone can post their music without a label backing them up, and build a career out of it as many don’t use any of the comparable digital music distributors to release their music.
Between copyright issues and other technical problems, producers, artists, and labels alike are tired of Soundcloud‘s policies, but there’s no other alternative.
In a new interview, Spotify founder Daniel Ek hinted that for their 10-year plan, they want to provide a service for new artists.
In an exclusive interview with Swedish TV4, the 33 year old CEO and co-founder of Spotify stated that there needs to be a focus on small-scale artists:
“During the next ten years we think there will be an incredible increase in the number of people creating music. The barriers for creating music have become much, much lower”
“Today Spotify has two million artists on its platform. To us, the next ten years is all about enabling these artists to make a living out of their music, and connect them with a new audience. Today our users say ‘introduce me to new music’. What the artists say is ‘help me finding my audience’. Essentially, that’s two sides of the same coin”
“Yes, trying to connect them and finding opportunities for artists to express themselves and for users to give feedback to the artists.”
Combining these two services would be the perfect solution for both fans of music and the industry.
Spotify’s strength is in numbers and economic value. With a net worth of over $8 billion, it’s no surprise that they’re looking to expand even more.
Soundcloud’s strength is that users are immediately able to post their music and get comments right away, while on Spotify there’s a process artists and labels must go through for music submission. Soundcloud has already put themselves on the market rumoring that the’re looking to sell for $1 billion. The truth is that Soundcloud Go is not even close to competing with Spotify.
Would a Spotify Soundcloud hybrid make everyone happy – fans, artists, and labels alike?
[Via Business Insider Nordic and Mixmag]
