One idea suggested by Royal is that the label’s opinion — and the radio station’s — is about to matter a lot less. All of a sudden, if you can grow a big enough social following, you can make a living off whatever music makes you happiest. This is somewhat true today, of course, but primarily to musicians who can live off touring and streaming reve... See more
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major label... See more
Secondly, your strengths to distribution increasingly get fragmented. So in the early days of streaming Spotify as the leader was the dominant platform, but we've seen not only other large leading streaming platforms develop and we can get into that dynamic because that's a very interesting part of the market as well, but we've now started to see d... See more
Now streaming is still the most important digital channel by far, but you're starting to see these new things emerge. So for an artist, there is a lot more complexity to distributing your product now.