The Verge:

Spotify has invested heavily in prerecorded podcast content, and now, the company is looking to host live audio conversations. The platform announced today that it’s acquiring Betty Labs, the company behind the live sports audio app Locker Room. Spotify didn’t disclose how much it spent on the purchase. 

As a result of the acquisition, Locker Room will stay live in the App Store but will be rebranded with a different name in the future on iOS and, eventually, Android with a broader focus on music, culture, and sports content. Spotify says it sees live audio as ideal for creators who want to connect with audiences in real time, whether that’s to premiere an album, host a question and answer session, or possibly even perform.

Wren Graves, writing at Consequence of Sound:

Spotify has announced a new pay transparency initiative, Loud & Clear, which is certainly one of those two things. This comes just days after the “Justice at Spotify” campaign organized worldwide protests outside of the streamer’s offices demanding one cent per stream, transparent contracts, a user-centric payment model, an end to payola, a switch to crediting all labor in recordings, and an end to lawsuits against artists.

Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:

Spotify announced today it will begin to test a new service that gives artists more of a say in how their music is discovered on the Spotify platform. At launch, the service will allow artists and labels to identify music that’s a priority to them, and Spotify will then add a signal to help the music get surfaced by its personalization algorithms.

While the new service is not a paid promotion and requires no upfront budget on artists’ or labels’ part, Spotify says that the artists, labels and rights holders will agree to be paid a “promotional recording royalty rate” for streams where the company provides the service. 

Peter Slattery, writing at OneZero :

While the platform pays only in the neighborhood of a third of a penny per stream if you’re not Drake, it boasts more than a quarter-billion active users. So, if your music ranks highly for a search term, you can accumulate enough listens to steadily make hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars a month with minimal effort.

The key to success is to find a phony artist name that Spotify users are likely to type into search. Like Relaxing Music Therapy, some of these “artists” use names inspired by an adjective commonly used to describe music. Others name themselves after popular uses for certain kinds of music, well-known generic tunes like children’s rhymes, or entire music genres. Often, these creators optimize further by titling tracks and albums with related words and reuploading the same songs ad nauseum, which can look especially absurd when filtering to see just a single tune. Relaxing Music Therapy, for instance, has uploaded the track “Stream in the Forest With Rain” 616 times to date.

Spotify’s CEO, Daniel Ek, talked with Music Ally about how he sees the music industry going forward:

“There is a narrative fallacy here, combined with the fact that, obviously, some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape, where you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough,” said Ek

“The artists today that are making it realise that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

Ek cited Taylor Swift’s activity around her new album ‘Folklore’ as just one recent example of an artist benefitting from that kind of effort.

“I feel, really, that the ones that aren’t doing well in streaming are predominantly people who want to release music the way it used to be released,” he said, as the interview ended.

Couple thoughts:

• As someone that loves the album experience, I hate this. I barely remember to listen to singles when they’re released and then forget they ever came out. Fine, I’m getting old, but shouldn’t the next “model” for releasing music actually be one where artists can release music in various ways, that they think best suits their art, and make a living doing it?
• Taylor Swift, and artists of her size, are usually the exception, not the rule.
• Spotify is worth $50 billion and barely, if at all, making money. That’s not sustainable. There’s a reason they’re spending so much money on premium podcasts and other content that’s not related to music.