Spotify CEO: Streaming allows more artists to make a living

"I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in an expansive new interview with the Freakonomics Radio podcast. He claims that more recording artists can make a full-time living now than they could in the CD era. "Back in 2000, 2001, at the very, very peak of the music industry, peak of CD... there were about 20- to maybe 30,000 artists that could live on being recorded music artists. Why? Well, because, again, the distribution costs so much, which ended up being that there’s very few artists that could even get distributed to begin with. And because the costs were fairly high for a person buying the music, you ended up going with what you knew and wouldn’t take that much risk on unknown artists. So in the world with streaming, what’s really interesting is the alternative cost for you to listen to something new is virtually zero. It’s just your time. And because of that, you do listen to a lot more music than you did before and you listen to a bigger diversity of artists than you did before which in turn then grows the music industry." Freakonomics...