Avicii's Manager: "Too many people have the wrong idea about Spotify"

Avicii’s manager Ash Pournouri published a guest column on Billboard stating that “…too many people have the wrong idea about Spotify is.”

The manager remarked that streaming services became an integral part of the release of Avicii’s album True: the marketing plan included setting up an empty Spotify playlist that saw 100,000 fans sign up and encouraging fans to add the tracks from the albums to their own Spotify playlists.

The result? In Avicii’s case the most-streamed song in Spotify’s history with 339 million streams to date with "Wake me up", but also a long-term success creating a long tail effect that continues to lift the artist’s catalog.

For example, when Avicii debuted his New Year’s eve playlist on Spotify “One World Party” he experienced double-digit chart gains in the streaming of his entire catalogue.

Pournouri does touch on the issue of royalties, stating that he is optimistic that the revenue from streaming will continue to grow as it has been in his native country Sweden. Quoting Next Big Sound’s statistics reporting a 95% increase of total music streams in 2014 over the previous year, he wonders: “Are you really going to say “no, thank you” to millions of Spotify users because you are waiting for the old way of doing business to return?”

The manager is not the only voice in the pro-Spotify camp. Ed Sheeran for example also stated that he “owed his career” to the streaming service.

Pournouri’s editorial shows that Spotify can be a tremendous opportunity for artists to broaden their audience, especially if they take care to think about their strategy on the service.

It is worth pointing out that Avicii is at N.3 in Forbes’ list of highest-paid DJs for 2014 and although Wake Me Up did sell over 4 million units in the US, the bulk of his income comes from the six-digit figures he makes for every club appearance he makes. Avicii’s case is pretty unique then, both because he is not relying particularly on recorded music revenues as his main source of income and because not many artists can get 100,000 people signed up to an empty playlist.

Unique circumstances aside, the playlisting argument remains an important one. No matter how small an artist may be, if fans get involved and start adding songs to their playlists that can have a significant effect on the the number of people that are exposed to it.


(Andrea Leonelli)