A great trader finds a way to play both sides of the market.
Although navigating the stock markets isn't exactly his main job description as a touring DJ and electronic music producer, Party Thieves has found an additional source of income from Spotify alongside his monthly royalties. And he says it pays much better dividends.
"I made more money off Spotify this month than they've paid me in royalties in my entire music career," Party Thieves tweeted. "Shorting Spotify stock seems to be my new career."
Party Thieves has amassed over 15.5 million streams of their top 10 most popular songs on Spotify alone. While he's had no trouble marketing his music on the platform, Spotify's compensation averages about $0.004 per stream — a point of frustration among artists trying to make a living off royalty cash flow alone.
His earliest singles on Spotify date back to 2015, but Party Thieves appears to have shorted Spotify more in just a few short weeks.
“It's no secret that streaming services pay artists very little. For the people reading this as a complaint, it's not – maybe it's a solution," Party Thieves told worldmusic.blog. "I'm very grateful for all the opportunities I've had throughout my music career and money is not a driving factor. But if you contextualize what's happening, music artists aren't getting paid to do anything other than make music anymore. So my suggestion: invest."
On November 1, Spotify closed at $300.95 per share. Since then, shares are down 42% as of this writing. Shares recently hit a 52-week low after the streaming giant issued a disappointing forecast on projected future subscriber growth. Spotify has outperformed the NASDAQ, which is currently down just 14.9% over the same period.
Although broader markets have trended downward over the past few weeks, the cycle has been particular for Spotify amid the increasingly competitive streaming landscape and a spate of controversy surrounding the growing number of artists demanding their content be removed entirely from the platform hard.
FOLLOW PARTY THIEF:
Facebook: facebook.com/PartyThievesMusic
Instagram: instagram.com/partythieves
Twitter: twitter.com/PartyThieves
Spotify: spoti.fi/3onehZt
