DJ Says He Made More Money Shorting Spotify In 1 Month Than His Lifetime Royalties – EDM.com

A great trader finds a way to play both sides of the market.

Though navigating equity markets is not exactly in his core job description as a touring DJ and electronic music producer, Party Thieves has found an additional stream of income from Spotify aside from his monthly royalties. And he says it’s paying far better dividends.

“I’ve made more money shorting Spotify this month than they’ve paid me in royalties thru [sic] my whole music career,” Party Thieves tweeted. “Shorting Spotify stock is my new career it seems.”

Party Thieves has amassed over 15.5 million streams on his top 10 most popular songs on Spotify alone. While he’s had no trouble marketing his music on the platform, Spotify’s compensation per stream is roughly $0.004 on average—a point of frustration among artists seeking to maintain a living wage through royalty cash flow alone.

His earliest singles on Spotify date back to 2015, but Party Thieves has apparently made more shorting Spotify stock in merely a few weeks time.

“It’s no secret that artists get paid very little by streaming services. For the people who read this as a complaint, it’s not—maybe it’s solution,” Party Thieves told EDM.com. “I’m very grateful for any and all opportunities I’ve had over my music career and money isn’t a driving factor. But when you contextualize what’s happening, music artists aren’t being paid more to do anything besides create music. So my suggestion: invest.”

On November 1st, Spotify’s price closed at $300.95 per share. Since then, shares have fallen 42% at the time of writing. Shares recently hit a 52-week low after the streaming giant delivered a disappointing forecast on their projected future subscriber growth. Spotify has underperformed the NASDAQ which is currently down just 14.9% over the same period.

Though the broader markets have downtrended in recent weeks, the cycle has been particularly rough on Spotify given the increasingly competitive streaming landscape and a wave of controversy surrounding the growing number of artists requesting to have their content removed from the platform altogether.