Daniel Biro

Been trying to work out if being on Spotify (free music streaming software) is a good thing for artists and labels. On the one hand being on there makes one’s music AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE  for free, on the other hand being on there makes one’s music available to everyone FOR FREE! Where’s the income going to come from? It’s like a radio station where you choose what you want to listen to with no restrictions apart from the occasional adverts. Spotify’s current hope is that people are going to pay £10 a month to get rid of the adverts interrupting the musical flow, but this is optimistic at best. And even if some do, how much of that is going to end up in the artist’s pocket? Pennies.

I’ve been using Spotify for a while now and I have certainly discovered a lot of new music that I wouldn’t otherwise have listened to. But I haven’t gone out to buy more CDs or downloads. On the contrary, even some of the artists whose latest works I would have automatically purchased in the past, I have been content in listening to a few times and then thinking: “Well, I’ve heard it now. No need to buy it”. I suspect that’s what most people are doing.

The other problem is once you get used to Spotify it’s very hard to revert back to buying things first and listening to them afterwards. The 30 seconds extracts found on iTunes seem inadequate and mean now.

Spotify’s catalogue is growing exponentially and now includes the majority of currently available and new releases. Only more obscure musics (Sargasso is not there yet…) seem to be absent. It’s popularity has sent shivers down the spines of all the people who so far have been making money from music sales.

So what kind of viable business model can Spotify offer? That’s the big question that all artists and record companies are asking themselves, while income is slipping through their fingers. Spotify is trying to reassure them to that investing in them will eventually pay dividends, but this is very far from certain at the moment. So unless the majors decide to suddenly pull out of Spotify altogether, everyone is waiting to see what will happen. Seems like the dotcom bubble all over again…

Are we seeing the beginning of the future of the music industry: giving it away for free?

Here’s a short I recently finished with Peter Davis. A sort of surreal thriller/noir with probably one of the longest titles in film history… Enjoyed doing it a lot, especially the sound-design. A lot of the soundtrack was done with samples I made years ago of an old AKS Synthi. Great instrument!

The plot is vaguely about a lone gunman who, in the split second before killing another victim, has sudden flashbacks of a previous hit causing his mind to start playing tricks with reality. OK, it’s weird… (make sure you turn up the volume)