This is another victory for Spotify: after a long wait, the reunited Led Zeppelin has made a deal with the Swedish company, making their entire catalog available via the streaming service. And since it’s now even free (as a radio) on your iPhone, there is no limit to Spotify which has actually obtained an exclusive deal with the famous rock band.
It’s really bad news for Spotify opponents, and it’s Led Zeppelin’s first agreement with a streaming service as the band was one of the strongholds of the resistance against these new technologies. The deal is the result of an intense competition between Spotify and other streaming services, so I wonder how much Spotify is paying Led Zeppelin, may be a bit more than their usual? Let’s see, Metallica signed a deal with Spotify in 2012, so which band is left out these days? AC/DC? The Beatles (which signed a deal with iTunes)? Pink Floyd? Tool? Radiohead? I am not exactly sure because you can nevertheless find parts of their respective catalogs when doing a search on Spotify. I wonder how long anybody will be able to resist. With the new free radio service, it’s now a matter of time till Spotify crushes Pandora (the first one has 20 million songs, whereas the second one has only 900,000)
At the top of this, Spotify has now extended its service to 20 new countries, in Latin America (Colombia, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, Chile,…), and Eastern Europe (Hungary, Bulgaria), making the service very powerful as Pandora is not really international.
However, last time I heard about Spotify’s revenue it wasn’t really good, right? According to The New York Times, even with a $578 million in revenue in 2012, the company was not profitable, … still not enough people paying! Thus, the new free mobile service is supposed to attract new subscribers (currently there are only 6 million of them) and more advertisers since your playlist is constantly interrupted by ads. May be Led Zeppelin will attract new listeners, but honestly, I doubt. Logically Zeppelin’s fans already have their albums, come on, this music is 25 year old at least! Why would anyone pay a service to play something they already have on CDs or iTunes? For me, Spotify is good to discover new music, not that much to stream old classics that you either own or don’t care for.