In an elegant rebuttal to their neighbouring competitors, Spotify have declared their plans for world domination within the music industry via their On Stream event.
What are they planning by 2025?
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1. Market Expansion: they plan to expand to 80 new markets – resulting in more than 1 billion Spotify users
2. Spotify and Social Media: they plan to include Spotify ‘clips’- which will harness social media and music consumption into one app.
3. Visual with Audio: they plan to include visual content when we listen to our music; including music videos and the visual side of podcasts. This will undoubtedly cause competition between themselves and YouTube.
4. Artists Marketing: in an attempt to earn more money, Spotify are also planning and providing marketing strategies for artists and labels to feature more prominently on playlists and next shuffle songs. The more you spend, the more you feature, right?
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What does this mean for artists and consumers?
With the fact that Spotify royalty payments do not pay artists enough – a fact that was glossed over this charade – is their response to it? Artists having to pay for listens? It seems that Spotify are planning to be on the same par as the conglomerates of Facebook and Instagram, with the features of social media, the use of marketing yourself as an artist distributor and the use of social media via ‘clips’, promoting a stronger desire to not only play music and listen to podcasts, but to do everything else we do on the Internet, too. All via one company.
Soon they won’t have to rely on others for the sharing of our stories, eh?
Cornering the market and becoming the number one streaming service, is certainly a clever idea and would undoubtedly increase their worldwide profits. The evils within Spotify are gleaming with glee at this prospect. And as ever, the creators who make the industry – who actually power Spotify to keep trudging on – are kept at the bottom of the pile again.
But, will these plans in place spark change and:
mvm. 
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