Audio streaming giant Spotify have begun the search for an ‘outstanding’ Associate Director with vast professional experience in internationals payments and regulatory procedures to support the company’s latest venture into global digital payments.

According to the application posted on LinkedIn today, the new team member will integrate into the Payments Strategy & Innovation team with a focus on defining and implementing payments strategy, as well as “leading Spotify’s activity within the Libra stablecoin project and wider digital asset & cryptocurrency space.”

The role will be co-based between Spotify’s London and Stockholm offices, requiring frequent travel between the two locations.

 

Partnerships

Spotify were an original member of the Libra Association upon founding back in October 2019. In contrast to other high-profile departures such as PayPal and Mastercard, as a result of regulatory concerns, Spotify remained.

The advertisement of this role stamps Spotify’s intentions to become a market leader in audio payments and to work alongside the Diem project to realise the vision of modern global payments.

“You will lead Spotify’s day-to-day engagement with the Diem Association. You will drive further consideration of new opportunities and innovation in the emerging ecosystem of distributed ledger technology, blockchains, cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and other digital assets”.

We’ve often heard cryptocurrency enthusiasts advocate that monetary payments should be as simple as sending text messages. In this case, it’s sharing music.

 

Tokenisation

As a tech company, it’s no surprise that in a year where global usage of technology has increased, Spotify have excelled. Quantitative listening data released publicly by the company for Q3 reveals a 29% increase in monthly active users year-over-year.

However, many artists and creators in their community have struggled to sustain their careers following the shutdown of performance venues which closed their main source of revenue. On top of this, Spotify have received backlash in recent years over their streaming payment model to artists. Although public data isn’t available, analysts have predicted that Spotify pay an average of $3.18 (£2.36) per 1,000 streams.

Looking in the future, it is possible to see Spotify launching their own cryptocurrency token native to their platform in the pursuit for a fairer, more democratic model of commerce between the two sides its platform facilitates: creators and fans. Similar to Brave’s native BAT token, the currency could reward creators for specific actions - uploading new music, collaborations, a certain number of song shares on social media etc.

Spotify for Artists recently launched a platform called Sound Better which is a market for musical artists to collaborative, receive payments and socially interact. An integration of cryptocurrency in this and their main audio ecosystem will likely be one of many visions for Spotify in the coming years.