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Digital
Spotify’s payments to STIM up eight fold
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 2 July 2010
Perhaps aware that the sort of Spotify backlash that has occurred in the artist community this year was in part motivated by the rumour Lady Gaga had earned just pennies from the streaming music service via the Swedish songs collecting society, despite her being one of the most played artists, said society, STIM, has announced an eightfold increase in Spot royalty revenues in the last year.
The collecting society itself is tight lipped on exactly how much that increase equates to in hard cash, though Swedish paper The Local says that STIM took in about half a million krona from Spotify for the year up to June 2009, so it must have take in about four million in the last year. Which would be just under £350,000.
Given that is just the publisher’s royalty for just Sweden, that might go some way to silencing critics who claim Spotify is anti-artist and is failing to sufficiently pay back creators for the use of their music. Or perhaps not.
Either way, those cynical about Spotify’s long term business model will probably question where the digital service plans to make that sort of money (and a whole lot more, record label royalties are likely to be much higher) once venture capital funds run out, given it’s likely neither ad nor subscription revenues are generating that sort of cash as yet
