Sony is re-evaluating its stance on music streaming services following Taylor Swift’s much-publicised spat with Spotify.
Chief financial officer of Sony Music, Kevin Kelleher, has revealed that the company is weighing up its continued support for music streaming services. It comes in the wake of pop star Swift pulling her entire back catalogue from Spotify and speaking out against perceived unfair artist payment rates.
“Actually, a lot of conversation has taken place over the last week in the light of that,” Kelleher said at a recent investor briefing. “What it all really comes down to is how much value are the music company and the artist getting from the different consumption methods.”
While Sony appears to be reappraising its position on such streaming service, though, don’t expect it to take as negative a stance as Taylor Swift. In fact, Kelleher revealed that his company was “very encouraged” by the performance of music subscription services to date.
In fact, Sony Music expects revenue to rise to the region of $4.8 billion to $5.2 billion in the next full fiscal year.
Of course, this seems to play into previous criticisms of Spotify and its ilk from artists such as Swift and Thom Yorke. The Radiohead frontman claims that Spotify represents an unwelcome bail-out of the old music label giants (such as Sony Music), providing a major source of income for them as physical format sales dry-up.
Sony’s issue, it seems, is whether the free-access portion of services like Spotify is impacting on potential profits. “The key question is, are the free, ad-supported services taking away from how quickly and to what extent we can grow those paid services?” said Kelleher.
Taylor Swift may have gotten Sony thinking, then, but that thinking doesn’t appear to be along similar lines.
Read More: Why musicians hate Spotify
Via: WSJ
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
