7 Reasons Why We Should All Thank Spotify

There’s a lot of controversy around Spotify.

Like many tech companies, Spotify invested heavily into human resources throughout the pandemic, as consumption levels across all digital platforms exploded and the stock market rallied, largely thanks to the government stimulus check.

As we've entered the post-pandemic era, the situation in the global economy has looked increasingly unstable; with supply chain issues causing havoc and the Russia / Ukraine war creating a real risk to global peace, Spotify has not been immune to the mass layoff (500+ just recently) of stuff that's been happening across the tech sector in the past several months.

Further, it feels like blog posts and articles are going up every single day, taking aim at Spotify and creating a perspective that Spotify is ripping off artists and that Spotify should be seen as a corporate bad guy out there in the music business.

I recently enjoyed watching 'The Playlist' on Netflix, which told a close-to real-life story of how Spotify overcame the odds to create a situation that has seen massive growth in the music business over the past 6-7 years.

Despite 'The Playlist' being largely positive towards Spotify, even this ended on a negative note: focusing on the fractious relationship artists have with the platform.

It's easy to focus on the negatives.

It's also easy to focus on negatives that do not portray the full picture and that sow a narrative that discredits the great work that Spotify has done in stimulating next-level growth in the music business.

The truth is that Spotify has revolutionized the music industry, and Goldman Sachs predicts that the music business could more than double its present size by 2030.

As you might have gathered, I'm a big fan of Spotify.

Over the past three years, I've personally spoken to over 5,000 artists on a 1-1 basis over zoom and from doing so, it's very apparent that my viewpoint is a contrarian one.

The truth is that most artists are not fans of Spotify.

It is my belief, that this is the case partly because artists are reading the negative press, but also because many don't remember, or are simply not even aware of how bad it was before Spotify existed.

In the words you read ahead, I'll aim to put forward 7 Reasons why we should all thank Spotify and I hope that if you're an artist (or you work with artists), you'll start to see things differently ahead.

Before you read on, for clarity, I have no affiliation with Spotify, and Spotify has NOT paid me to write this article!