Daniel.Hjelmtorp.com

In recent months, Spotify have been on many peoples lips around me. Music streaming services have come and gone, but I have never heard so much good reviews and word of mouth as Spotify. Not only developed in Sweden, but with a great working service and impressive content catalogue this one have all the possibilities to be a smash hit!  Currently in Beta and Invite only, it seems everyone around me using and loving it. And already are people working to port the service to mobile phones.

Today a free music streaming service, and it seems the business model and revenue in the future will come from Premium-paying-customer and audio advertisement. Though many of us who use it wonder how they will make money. One thing is sure, and that goes for all new entertainment media services; without content no service will be used. And for Spotify to attract more users it needs even more music. Not only the music from the “big bad boys”, but all smaller to fill the Long Tail as well.

But once again, it seems the music industry won’t take risks or simply won’t people to discover and listen to new music. This is thanks to the fear from the big record labels, who want to limit the amount of songs offers in the service and forced Spotify to take down many songs and tracks.  Once again its the lawyer who stands in the way of evolution of the music distribution media. Instead of taking a step forward the industry take a few back. The big companies still don’t seem to trust new platforms. Today I finished reading The Viking Manifesto, how we can learn business theories and ideas from the old Vikings. One chapter simply titled “Put lawyers last in the boat”, which means that lawyer (even how great and talented they are) often are counter-productive and often in the way of creativity.

I truly hope Spotify becomes a great hit! Not only cause its a Swedish company, but cause the music industry truly need a big push to cope with the incresing piracy. The CEO of Spotify Daniel Ek also believe the business model could work great for games as well. But this reqiures the game industry to adopt to the streaming model. I personaly thing the game industry is more keen on change than its older brother music. As newly appointed president of the United States, Barack Obama pushed into peoples mind, Change is emintent for surviual. Specially in the fast hardening media business. And that size and slow bureaucracy don’t always is the best move. Like the Vikings, even thou they were few they always adpoted and changed tactics to their advantage. Spotify have all those possibilites, but still rely on others for content and become the next iTunes hit.