Will Spotify offer NFTs soon?

Many questions surrounding NFTs are yet to be answered, such as how you can prevent people selling a song as an NFT when they don’t have the rights to it. Plus, there are still the big hurdles for the average consumers. Still, it’s important to note: The NFT hype is real. This obviously didn’t escape the tech giants either, who while not necessarily creating trends, have always been good at adapting to them in a quick and user-friendly manner.

Spotify as a boost for music NFTs?

From Instagram to Twitter to Reddit, various platforms have announced that they will incorporate NFTs. Now, we can see the first signs that Spotify, too, is flirting with the idea. As the Financial Times have discovered, Spotify has published various job postings in the Web 3.0 department. This points to an expansion into the areas of Blockchain, NFTs, or the Metaverse. In general, it will be exciting to see how we can avoid the Web 3.0 being dominated by the same players as the current Web 2.0, but that’s a whole different debate, of course.

The fact is that if Spotify does enter the NFT market, it will give music NFTs an enormous boost due to their huge user base. This will be the case especially if they were to make the buying process a lot easier, so that crypto-savvy users aren’t the only ones who can participate. Additionally, the competition would be forced to follow suit, which would accelerate the progress for music NFTs even further. At the moment, this is still a long way off, but we will keep a close watch on these developments.

Spotify under criticism

Additionally, Spotify is making other headlines, as well – this time for sponsoring FC Barcelona. Spotify is ready to shell out 310 million dollars over the course of four years for it. In exchange, not only will the Spotify logo be printed on the jerseys, but the stadium will also be renamed Spotify Camp Nou. Quite of few, however, are probably wondering why this money isn’t going to the artists.

Let’s take a look at some numbers: In the last four years, Spotify has invested 3.96 billion dollars into their marketing. The Barcelona deal would therefore only make up 8% of these costs. Suddenly the number doesn’t seem so big anymore. And of course, Spotify is of the mind that the musicians will benefit from the deal, as well.

The folks at Musicbusinessworldwide have calculated how many streams it would take to garner 310 billion dollars. Based on their findings, that would be 89.08 billion.

As it turns out, there is not a single artist on Spotify who has reached this number of streams. The record holder is Drake with 62.84 billion streams, although 17.57 billion of these come from features. For the 45.27 billion streams of his own releases, approximately 157 million have been paid out – far from what Barcelona is getting. This is especially hard to swallow for the songwriters, whose share of the pie Spotify continues to try to beat down.