By Associated Press
LOS ANGELES —
There are about 600 versions of Adele’s Oscar-winning song “Skyfall” on the Spotify subscription music service. Not one of them features Adele.
Adele’s label, XL Recordings, keeps her music off of all-you-can-listen subscription plans until download sales peter out. In the meantime, copycat artists fill the void, racking up royalty revenue, often before customers realize they’ve been listening to someone else.
Alice Bonde Nissen found that out the hard way. She once paid 99 Krone ($17) a month for Spotify’s premium service in Denmark. Bonde found a version of “Skyfall” and mistakenly clicked on a “follow” button to become a fan of GMPresents and Jocelyn Scofield, the name for a cover-song specialist with some 4,600 Spotify followers. Scofield, who didn’t respond to a message seeking comment for this story, has the most listened-to cover of “Skyfall” on the service.
“When I found out ... that I couldn’t find the original ‘Skyfall’ (and some other hits) I decided to quit Spotify,” Nissen says.
Thousands of cover songs crowd digital music services such as Spotify and Rhapsody and listeners are getting annoyed. The phenomenon threatens the growth of these services —which have millions of paying subscribers— and could hold back the tepid recovery of a music industry still reeling from the decline of the CD.
Spotify’s head of development and analysis, Sachin Doshi, acknowledges that finding covers instead of originals can be frustrating. “We recognize it’s a problem we haven’t fully solved yet,” Doshi says.
Jon Maples, Rhapsody’s vice president of product management, says customers have asked that cover songs be removed and the company has targeted 10,000 for deletion. “It just clutters the experience,” he says.
Since Adele’s “Skyfall” was released in October, it has sold 2 million copies in the U.S. Cover artists sold more than 54,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The top-selling cover was produced by Movie Sounds Unlimited, a subsidiary of German music publisher BMG, and sold over 9,800 units.
The singer on the Movie Sounds Unlimited version of “Skyfall” imitates Adele’s official version down to the brassy intro and the unique way the British diva rolls over the sound “L’’ like an “O’’ when she sings “Let the sky fall when it crum-bows.”
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