2015 has been a crazy year for me, and Spotify have supported me right from the start. It's an honour to be their Breakout Artist of the year, and I'm super excited to see what we can do together in 2016!
In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.
Spotify favors hits. It's very much a meritocracy: It's not like radio, where whatever is being played is what you hear. We offer songs up, and from there, it's up to consumers to stream the music or not.
With Spotify, I think people are discovering a lot of artists they might not discover otherwise.
There are a number of start-ups in Europe that are able to reach beyond their own country. Take Spotify - Spotify just in Sweden isn't that interesting compared to Spotify all over the world.
I imagine if Spotify becomes something that people are willing to pay for, then I'm sure iTunes will just create their own service, and they're actually fair to artists.
Spotify stresses me the hell out.
Companies like Spotify, the new Apple service, and all the others are really going to have to pay artists more. And I think it's a matter of time; I think a lot of these companies and the individuals that are involved in them realize that as well. They know that artists are not getting what they should be getting.
'Me Like Yuh' got, like, 20 million plays on Spotify.
There are half a billion people that listen to music online and the vast majority are doing so illegally. But if we bring those people over to the legal side and Spotify, what is going to happen is we are going to double the music industry and that will lead to more artists creating great new music.
This is a way for artists to communicate directly to their fans. If you think of an artist like Bruno Mars, he's using Spotify, creating playlists and listening to music through it.
My third hire when I came to Spotify was Tiffany Kumar, who came on as our global head of songwriter relations. The whole idea was to put our heads together and figure out how to build and contribute within the songwriting community.
With Spotify and all those streaming services, you don't get paid anything. You have to be, like, Madonna or something to actually make a real royalty from that.
I'm very excited about my new Spotify account, which gives me access to twenty gazillion songs any time, all the time. The day I opened my account, though, I sat there perplexed. How would I figure out what I wanted to hear?
When you listen to music through Spotify, you don't own the song, even though you might be able to listen to it at any time.
Spotify - I met those guys before they launched in America and was wildly excited about the idea. 'Wow, this is all the music in the world, for a flat fee.'
The insomnia just perpetuates. I have one bad night, then I get it in my head that I can't sleep. I've been trying these meditation tapes - there are a couple on Spotify - and they're meant to calm you. But they don't seem to work.
I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.
When Spotify launched in the U.S. in 2011, it relied on simple usage-based algorithms to connect users and music, a process known as 'collaborative filtering.' These algorithms were more often annoying than useful.
The owner of Spotify is worth something like 3 billion dollars ... he's richer than Paul McCartney and he's 30 and he's never written a song.
I use Spotify to listen to music when I am taking a shower and when I am doing projects.
Spotify is a platform: it could be expanded to other types of content.
Spotify wants to make consuming music simpler and at the same time pay the rights owners.
I think the next big thing in music, and it's kind of because I come from the tech industry, is actually, I think it's the platform... Spotify is incredibly interesting. I think the platform is becoming the star.
I have a song coming with blackbear. He's a huge artist, I would say in the dark-pop scene. He has also collaborated with a lot of hip-hop artists. He's huge on Spotify.
