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Spotify reportedly raising more investment
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 8 November 2013
Spotify is raising another round of investment, according to reports, because, as it turns out, fucking over Thom Yorke’s actually quite expensive.
According to Sky News, Spotify bosses are talking to California-based Technology Crossover Ventures about a possible $200 million investment that would give the finance firm a decent stake in the streaming music company.
Back in September there were reports that, while Spotify was looking to raise more cash to fuel further expansion, the company was likely to borrow rather than sell more equity, because founders and/or early-to-the-gate investors were nervous of further diluting their shareholdings in the company.
Though given yesterday’s Twitter IPO in New York, which has presumably reassured the venture capitalist community that the dicks of Wall Street will still vastly overpay for tech stock if you just position the sale in the right way, perhaps Spotify’s shareholders are now less worried about the potential of their big sale payday.
Whatever, Sky reckons Spotify’s talks with TCV about it making an investment are now in “advanced stages”.
Elsewhere in Spotify news, a Finnish singer-songwriter called Anssi Kela has shared some info about the streaming royalties he received for his track ‘Levoton Tyttö’, which has been a big hit in his home country this year. He reveals that the track was streamed over a million times between March and June (across all services, though he suggests Spotify accounts for the majority) which generated him royalties of 2336 euros.
Although it’s not 100% clear, it seems this figure relates to the cut of streaming income Kela receives from his record company, Sony Music, ie his cut of the royalties paid by Spotify et al for the recording rights in the track, so any publishing income would be in addition to this. But even so, many would argue that’s still very low for a hit record.
Though Kela hasn’t shared this information as part of an angry attack on Spotify. Rather, he notes that his 79 tracks in the Spotify catalogue will generate further income every month for the foreseeable future, while also revealing that he earns around ten times more when his music is played by a premium subscriber rather than a freemium user.
So, far from calling for a boycott of Spotify, he suggests that fans interested in supporting their favourite artists should consider becoming a paying user of the streaming platform. You can read Kela’s blog post, albeit in Finnish, here, and Music Ally’s quick analysis of the figures here.
