St Holdings is a record distributor and 234 of their labels have pulled off Spotifty. The numbers are staggering but before I give them to you, a couple of caveats.
1. These are specialized boutique labels representing, in ST Holdings words, "electronic music: dubstep, drum & bass, techno, grime, wonky, uk funky, bass music … all forms of evolutionary electronic music. "
2. You don't tour behind this stuff. You mae your money on releasing music.
3. Folks who are into grime and wonk are likely to be very computer savvy and therefore more likely to use Spotify.
Now for the numbers, according to Hypebot:
- In the third quarter of 2011 – the first full quarter that the distributor supplied content to these services – ST’s digital revenue fell for the first time in its history, down 14%.
- iTunes revenue in the same quarter fell 24%.
- Spotify, Simfy, Rdio and Napster accounted for 82% of all ST tracks "consumed" in Q3 but only 2.6% of that quarters Q3 revenue.
- Spotify paid £2,500 or $3376 USD for 750,000 streams in the quarter.