Since its launch Spotify has been receiving a hard time about royalties. I’m a firm believer that Spotify is a great innovation and  that its where music consumption is heading. It has also been shown that Spotify has helped to increase music download sales and not cannibalize them, and this is what we have seen here at RouteNote.

At RouteNote we haven’t been sharing much information to the community about our stats, but that is going to change. We believe that transparency is very important and we want to let everyone know that Spotify is a great way for bands to monetize and promote their music.

Spotify as a percentage of RouteNote’s overall royalties:

Q3 2010 = 2.71%

Q4 2010 = 5.55%

Q1 2011 = 5.07%

Q2 2011 = 7.34%

Q3 2011 = 8.84%

Q4 2011 = 11.18%

Q1 2012 = 18.55%

As you can see… Spotify as a percentage of RouteNote’s overall royalties are growing nicely.

Additionally, the actual royalties numbers per play are increasing month by month. These per play numbers are a lot higher than you would expect to see when you received royalties from YouTube ($2.00/1000) or even basic advertising royalties ($1.00/1000).

Spotify is a great innovation for the music industry and instead of criticizing it, we should be focusing on how the service can be improved and how it can help musicians monetize/promote their music.

p.s. RouteNote Free model is a great way for artists to monetize their free music via Spotify streams