Music industry becoming all about access

The future of the music industry will be about access and ownership, Spotify’s chief executive and founder Daniel Ek has said.
Pleased that discussions are now centred on streaming rather than what is free or not, he told Grammy.com that revenues and royalties for the music industry will start to grow and eventually move past the growth producers witnessed before the internet.
Ek was speaking to Grammy about Spotify ahead of giving a speech at a Grammy Foundation’s entertainment law initiative luncheon.
He claimed that now, music is entering a “golden age” where listening to and discovering new music through friends will become more important and help new acts get heard.
“Spotify, up until now, hasn’t really done a great job of helping that, but you’re going to see us doing more and more to break acts and try to really promote them as well,” he said.
“Looking at Spotify today and fast-forwarding three years to 2015: Where’s the music industry? Where’s Spotify, and what does this mean to a band, manager or label? I think it’s exciting times.”
He suggested that the music streaming service, which only launched in the US in July last year, could be the new place for cheap marketing as “MTV’s not about music anymore and radio is even hard[er] to break through” with stations playing music people already know.
Ek also highlighted the importance of sharing via Spotify. The company recently joined forces with Facebook to encourage friends to share their playlists and Ek told Grammy that sharing has allowed bands to finally get a record deal.
“In the future, we’re getting more and more connected, all over the world, and hopefully that will mean that great music will prevail, because your friends will listen to it and share it with other friends,” he explained.
Spotify has now reached more than ten million active users in the US and the founder noted that album sales increased last year for the first time in 2004, suggesting that more people are listening to music legally.