The story of music in the 21st century has been the story of distribution and not sound -I think the last time there was this huge distribution change was in the early 1900s with the phonogram and before that printed sheet music in the 1500s.
In the same way that MTV brought in the age of video, MP3s brought in the age of streaming and as Spotify, Apple. And the three major recording labels battle it out, the fight is not a fight for music, appearance notwithstanding, it is a fight for how the music is delivered and at what price.
It is such a difficult call, if you push too hard people will just steal it, if you stay too cheap, you won’t make money, if you make it too complicated they won’t bother, if you make it too diffuse, they won’t collect it. . So what do you do? This is such an important question that Universal may very well fuck over Spotify (which they own 15% of), if Spotify don’t modify their free tier.
That’s the argument Apple is bringing to the table: no free tier, people will have to pay something and if Spotify don’t have the major labels on board they will be done for.
This is Spotify’s fault.
They had three years where they were the only important game in town and they should have spent it signing people everywhere all the time, instead of dicking around with social media. It was their one responsibility. To put it simply:
- Paying subscribers: Over 15 million
- Active users: Over 60 million*
That won’t cut it.
There are 7 billion people on the planet, 60 million users is less than 1%.
In comparison, ITunes sells 26 million songs a day.
With the field to themselves, they should have advertised Spotify everywhere till it became part of the landscape, till the commercial was being spoofed on SNL, and they should have gone after paid subscribers day and night, instead they sat back and waited and while they were waiting, Apple woke up.