15 Years Later: How Spotify Has Evolved the Music Industry — Brian Berner
It’s been 15 years since Spotify’s inception. It feels like a lifetime ago, but it also feels like it just happened yesterday. We all know how quickly things can change in a year, so imagine the momentous change that can happen over a 15-year time span. While I haven’t been at Spotify since the beginning, I have been there for almost ten years at this point.
When I think back to the early ’00s, I can hardly believe just how much my own life has evolved over the years. And then I think about how the world used to be and how different things were, and it almost feels like another lifetime. Thinking about the music industry, it’s almost absurd what the state of the music business was like in the early ’00s. I think of this time period as pre-Spotify; after 2006, everything changed.
Below are some of the biggest changes and innovations Spotify brought to the music industry.
The Fall of Music Piracy
Remember Limewire and Napster? I’ve unlocked a deep memory in your head, right? Music piracy was at an all-time high in the early ’00s. It was so rampant that the industry shed billions of dollars of revenue in just a few short years. Spotify recognized the piracy problem and built a solution on the notion that consumers who didn’t want to pay for an album or song may be more inclined to pay to have access to a large library of music. It cost consumers just $10 a month to access almost any song they could dream of; just like Spotify imagined, creating an easier streaming service helped to reduce the amount of illegal downloads. Between 2013 and 2018, the rate of piracy fell from 18 percent to 10 percent.
Music De-Gentrification
When CDs were all the craze, consumers were spending up to $20 for just one album. Because CDs were so expensive, people were more critical of the kinds of albums they bought. Instead of exploring new artists and broadening their music choices, they were more likely to stick with the artists and albums they already knew and loved. But for $10 a month, Spotify gave consumers the ability to explore every artist on their platform, making music more accessible than ever before. Whereas most people used to have one genre they stuck to in the early ’00s, studies now show that younger Spotify users have more diverse music preferences.
A Behind-the-Scenes Look Into an Artist’s Life
Before the world became more digitized, there was a huge gap between people and the artists they listened to. You bought a CD, listened to it on repeat, and researched your favorite artists if you wanted to learn more about them beyond their musical abilities. Ushering in the new age of music, Spotify was the first streaming platform to allow artists to share their stories. Musicians are able to record short videos that fans can access where they talk more about their personal lives and their inspiration for songs, which helps people feel connected to their favorite bands in ways never before imaginable.
These are just a few ways that Spotify has helped evolve the music industry over the last 15 years. And I, for one, cannot wait to see the changes Spotify continues to bring to the music industry over the next 15 years and beyond.
Originally published on Brian Berner’s LinkedIn on May 26, 2021.