Final Essay Proposal
Topic Chosen
The topic selected is Information: Access and Effects. This paper will use Spotify, as an example to illustrate the negative implications that their access policies have on the music industry.
Thesis
Artists in the music industry are negatively impacted by digital music streaming; Spotify, a common music streaming site, uses their structure to manipulate royalties, leaving artists with devalued music and profit and publicity loss.
Supporting Arguments
The first supporting argument is that Spotify’s payment model is unfair to artists, as it is imbalanced and has low pay-rates. Like iTunes, the system is based on number of plays per song, however, where iTunes has a 50:50 payout of the $0.99 song between them and the artist, Spotify pays between $0.006-$0.008 per play. (Gross 2014) To put this into perspective, “it takes 1,117,021 song plays though Spotify music streaming service for a solo artist to make a US
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Spotify supports this evolution through its free and premium subscriptions. “Spotify’s user base exceeds fifty million globally, with twelve and a half million paying subscribers,” (Spotify 2016) this meaning that 75% of consumers are listening for free, taking away potentially 75% of album sales. However, even if Spotify is paying artists next to nothing, some artists aren’t even offered the opportunity to be present on the site. If the artist falls into a minority or a sub-culture of music, it will not be on Spotify’s site, because they do not believe it will make enough money for them. We are currently “struggling against forces at the very nexus of commerce, culture and education that have conspired to make music less meaningful to the public at large” (Havighurst