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During this year’s first six month Swedish recod companies and labels increased sales by 1.7 percent, according to new figures by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Lisa Cronstedt, spokeswoman at Ifpi in Sweden, said that better legal alternatives, the new “Ipred” copyright law and a good selection of music mainly explain the upswing. “Sweden is still one of the few countries in the world music with a positive sales performance”, she said. Revenues from albums dived 18 percent but still contributes for 64 percent of the record companies sales. Digital music accounts for one-third of the sale, an increase by more than 100 percent. Sales of digitally streamed music increased 242 percent during the period.

Promoting it for free unlimited access sold twice as many downloads at iTunes, as a main page placement in iTunes. So it didn’t cannibalize at all. What we see is: the more people are streaming music, interested in music, finding out, sharing it, the more it drives all the other revenue streams for that same music product. And you know, it’s kind of the radio effect, you know, when you play, if you hear something on the radio, how come we’ve known for 50 years that if it’s played on the radio, we sell more albums. And we’re starting to see the same thing. I can do a direct correlation with what’s our best, most played songs at Spotify and I can map that exactly with downloads. It’s a one-to-one relationship.

Scott Cohen (VP of The Orchard) explains what Spotify means to rights holders.