Radiohead’s Spotify snub: another sign the service should change stance on windowing?
Radiohead yesterday released their new album “A Moon Shaped Pool”. The release is available to purchase on the band’s website, iTunes, Amazon, and the album is also available to stream on Apple Music and TIDAL.
Spotify is being snubbed, most probably because it continues to want to provide the same releases to both free and premium users.
This could easily be brushed off as “just another” example of an artist not understanding Spotify’s model. At the same time, the hottest artists on the planet like Beyonce, Drake, Kanye (for a few weeks), Radiohead, Adele (obviously) are the just the highest-profile examples during the past 12 months of artists that chose not to stream on Spotify on release day.
Certainly the fact that Tidal exists has contributed to some of these releases being kept from Spotify (and other streaming services), but the industry has a particular beef with Spotify, since the service does not allow “windowing”, i.e. streaming a release to premium users only to avoid cannibalising sales with everyone else, especially in the first few weeks of release.
Spotify’s argument for this policy has always been and remains solid from a theoretical point of view: if you provide users with the same great catalogue provided to Premium subscribers, you’ll get them hooked and upgrading in time. Also, if you let one artist window, they will all want to do it, potentially leading to very few new releases being available to free users on Day 1.
This stance has worked very well for the company and arguably contributed to its growth to date.
However, as the service now counts tens of millions of paying subscribers, questions amongst those subscribers will start to arise as to why they should be penalised and unable to stream certain releases purely because the company doesn’t want there to be a difference between those paying £120 per year and those paying £0.
In addition, those who are using Spotify’s free service may actually start to seriously think about choosing Apple Music or even Tidal once they decide to upgrade in order to get the highest chance of being able to hear the latest releases. In this case, Spotify may be getting people used to streaming who are then going to move on to another provider.
Three, four years ago the “snubs” didn’t matter much as the general public was not as aware of them as today. Now, as the first headline of many websites is “Radiohead’s new album: where can you stream it?”, the fact that Spotify is missing from that list is becoming painfully apparent.
With hundreds of millions in new funding and continued user growth, Spotify may well decide not to change course after all these years, but judging from the company’s quick reaction - a statement saying: “we look forward to making the rest of A Moon Shaped Pool available on Spotify as soon as we can” - it seems like the heat is really on this time.
(Andrea Leonelli)