Taylor Swift had the biggest selling album of 2014 by a large margin. We don’t know how much she sacrificed in royalty payments by pulling her music from streaming services such as Spotify, but given her estimated 3.66 million in album sales generated an estimated $47 million, it was a great year. Taylor Swift is likely to follow that up with 2015 concert tour revenue of over $200 million. It’s profitable to be popular.
You might also expect Taylor Swift to start #taylurking on Spotify again. If she wants maximum exposure during her concert tour, Spotify is a powerful channel to reach audiences. Her self-directed music windowing experiment will be complete. We discussed some of Taylor Swift’s misleading statements about the music streaming industry in November. They turned out to be a lot of smoke, but no fire.
Spotify Grows without the Swifties
Recently, it was announced that Spotify is working with Goldman Sachs to raise $500 million in venture financing. This follows a string of good news for the service. Earlier in January, Spotify announced fourth quarter listener growth from fifty to sixty million monthly users. Buried in that growth is an increase of subscribers from twelve to fifteen million. According to the Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Venture Partners estimates that Spotify generated $1.3 billion in revenue in 2014. That is expected to be at least 30 percent more than Pandora grossed last year.
All of this was going on despite a spat that pop’s biggest star of 2014 started with the music streaming service…Read the full article here: http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/big-winners-of-2014-taylor-swift-and-spotify
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