And while the income that middle-tier musicians receive from Spotify is paltry, it’s still crucial for fledgling artists to have their music available on the world’s foremost music streaming service. Many of the artists affected were taken by surprise, alerted to the news by fans instead of by Spotify or their business teams - and it was yet another problem to deal with on top of a brutal pandemic year that halted nearly all touring revenue. There’s no official tally, but music attorney Wallace Collins wrote in a widely circulated blog post that, based on discussions with his clients, it seems as many as 750,000 tracks may’ve been wiped.

“Problematic” was one of a plethora of tracks quietly purged from the service on January 1st, 2021. But Young says she has never paid for third-party streaming boosts. when a paid marketing service, manager, or agency uses bots to artificially boost play numbers and increase an artist’s revenue, which is a practice banned under Spotify’s terms of service. He explained Spotify often performs a sweep of songs they suspect have fake streaming activity - a.k.a. “ didn’t give me a warning or reach out to me to ask about the issue,” she says. Her distributor DistroKid emailed later that day to confirm the track was removed, with no explanation as to why. Young reached out to the streaming service, but to no avail. But that’s what happened in the late hours of January 2nd when a fan frantically messaged the Los Angeles-based pop singer to ask why her song “Problematic” had vanished from Spotify the day before. It's doubtful that Apple will just ignore this move.Furiously writing emails wasn’t how Callie Young wanted to start her 2021. Spotify is only letting users purchase audiobooks from a web browser. This circumvents Apple's hefty take rate for purchases made from within an iOS app. Speaking of audiobook downloads, we can't forget about Apple. But it will still be interesting to see how Amazon responds. Spotify's audiobooks are purchased individually, so this may attract different sets of users.

However, it also creates new competitive challenges against top technology companies, including Amazon and Apple.įor Amazon, it offers an audiobook subscription service, and its Audible platform dominates the market. Therefore, this does provide the company with a new growth opportunity. Management is excited because the audiobook industry is growing 20% annually. Looking ahead to how it can gain and retain new users, Spotify launched audiobooks in the U.S. All of this said, it seems like Spotify stock was down in September mostly because the market had a rough month.

Spotify down in us