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Business News
UK music performs even better on Spotify
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 10 October 2014
Readers in Clacton were presumably horrified to read earlier this week that Swedish firm Spotify has gone into profit here in the UK, coming over here, streaming our songs, taking away business from obviously superior British-made streaming platforms like Blinkbox and Rara.com, which, if nothing else, at least know how to make a proper cup of tea.
Well, take heart Clactonites, the Swedes may be dominating the streaming market in Europe just now, but it’s good old fashioned, properly made and finely tuned British music that is powered the stream factory, with Spotify confirming yesterday that just under one fifth of all the tracks played on the service worldwide come from this Scepter’d Isle. Ha, take that Sweden with your globally admired pop songwriting community and consistently impressive new musical output, we’ve got One Direction, Calvin Harris and Ed Sheeran – boom!
Says the boss of UK record industry trade grouping BPI, Geoff Taylor: “The outstanding performance of British music globally on Spotify suggests that our exceptional music heritage may position us to claim an even greater share of the world market for recorded music in a streaming era. And as the busy last quarter of the year gets underway, a string of new releases from Calvin Harris, One Direction, Jessie J and Rumer promise a strong British performance at the top of the UK streaming charts”.
Meanwhile Spotify man Kevin Brown added: “The BPI revealed this year that British artists are responsible for a huge one in eight of all albums sold worldwide. However, British talent over-indexes to an even greater degree on Spotify, where British artists now make up an incredible one-fifth of all tracks currently streamed on Spotify worldwide. This huge market share is testament both to the incredible home-grown talent we have here, and the ability Spotify offers to artists to share their music and build audiences of engaged music fans all over the world”.
