If you are looking for the new Black Keys' album ‘El Camino’ on Spotify, you will not find it, as drummer Patrick Carney declared during an interview with VH1 they had decided to withhold their new album from all streaming music services (Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, and Rhapsody)
Their excuse? They are really straightforward about it, saying that royalties coming from streaming services are not the equivalent to royalties coming from record sales, and that it is quite unfair to people who purchased the album that other people can stream it for free.
I agree, there are so many albums I did not buy because I can stream them on Spotify! It is weird, as the fine line between purchased music in mp3 and streaming music becomes more and more invisible, when I open Spotify, sometimes I don’t even remember what I own and what I am streaming since the content of my iTunes library shows up in Spotify
The Black Keys added that they agree about the fact that streaming services are a good thing for unknown and small bands, since it is a way to get their music out there, whereas bands who are making a living out their music, end up basically being screwed up by these kinds of services.
Coldplay recently adopted the same reasoning for their latest release ‘Mylo Xyloto’ (although they were not as honest as the Black Keys and suggested some kind of non sense reason like they didn’t want the songs to be separately streamed)
The big news on Tuesday was that Arcade Fire and their entire catalogue had joined Spotify, but their last album is already one year and half old, let’s see if they put their next release right away on Spotify when it is released.
According to a statement made by Spotify, they are now the second single largest source of digital music revenue for labels in Europe and have ‘driven more than $150 million of revenue to … artists, publishers and labels since our launch three years ago’.
And when Spotify pretends that ‘artists can — and do — receive very substantial revenues from Spotify’, the truth is that,…. Well not really, it is much more lucrative for big labels than for artists, as the LA Times pointed out that ‘a song has to be played between 100 and 150 times on a streaming service in order to generate the same licensing revenue as a single download sale’. In the same vein, I was reading a tweet from a small band ironically thanking Spotify for a $83 check which was corresponding to a few thousands of hits.
I enjoy Spotify greatly, well it’s free music! But I am certainly not blaming artists who don’t put their album on Spotify, when they can afford to do so.
The Black Keys will eventually put ‘El Camino’ on the streaming services in a couple of years as they said, but for now, we are just stuck with the single