The downfall of corporate radio since the 1996 Telecom Act found ownerships of radio stations trying to monetize and turn every minute of airtime into a paid (announced or unannounced) ad. Without a doubt that has been it’s demise. Strong programming (music content) should be rewarded through successful advertiser appeal. Sales staffs have no problem selling a station people are listening to. If the programming is good, the advertisers will come.

Spotify is similar. Advertisers get exposure to users through content. Good content (niche delivery mechanism) brings users. Who pays for the production of content? The labels and artists. Who uses the content? The end user, through listening and downloading. Who benefits? Advertisers who can rely on traffic to have their product viewed. With a ubiquitous catalog of music available, the best music should help deliver users to the ads/products that the corporations wish to advertise. The artists with the most popular/most streamed music should benefit in almost Darwinian fashion through compensation and financial reward from the advertisers for bringing people to their product. This makes alot of sense.

In the future, imagine if Pepsi started a record label to use music to help market their product…a site like Spotify could be a means for them to get into and do some research into that. Let’s face, it’s all about lifestyle when it comes to advertisers and product. The artists will benefit if corporations start funding artistic endeavours. To sell Pepsi, perhaps Pepsi needs an artist roster and needs to begin paying for recording projects. For independents artists, this could mean a new source of funding that is NOT reliant on the traditional major label system.