According to Billboard (here) Spotify and Universal are at an impasse but they aren’t really.
As I’ve been writing over the past six months, , without Universal signing to renew their deal with Spotify, Spotify is finished, and if part ownership and billions of bucks won’t get Universal (and Sony will follow Universal and WB will follow both), won’t get them to sign, what will? Let’s say Spotify agrees to Universal and all but kills their free platform, what happens then? Then Apple swoops down and claims Spotify’s paid subscribers and Spotify is dead.
So what happens now?
I don’t know.
I do know this, I once pitched a Spotify muckety muck on the central importance of upping their paid subscription base and they all but sneered at me. There was nothing more important for Spotify and all they did was fuck around for the past three years. They should have advertised everywhere all the time, if they had 50 million paid subscriptions today, they’d be paying their artists a lot more money. As Billboard noted, the freemium tier generates 10% of Spotify’s revenue.
What will I do if Spotify folds and nobody replaces em? I will become a member of one of the many many pirate streaming services that will appear fast and furious everywhere and who will pay the world labels and artists doodley squat. Meanwhile, Universal and Spotify are playing chicken and you better believe Spotify have to make a deal.