Like Musicians, Spotify Struggles to Make Profit

If you’ve been online these past few months, you may have noticed frequent mentioning of unfairly low income rates for artists who upload onto streaming platforms such as Spotify. As Engadget points out, it’s not just the artists who struggle in making profits, but that the company itself is also. Not only that, but Spotify has just disclosed that — although earning over $1 billion dollars in 2013 — paying back to its contracted record companies has rendered the company with $80 million in net losses, although much less than the number they had experienced in 2012. This is not the first time we’ve heard about streaming platforms experiencing this issue, as SoundCloud has suffered similar losses to a relatively smaller, but considerable, proportion. As an upward number of music listeners are opting for free alternatives as opposed to purchasing music, we could start seeing many changes and new ideas develop in order to execute this.