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Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason to think that this market is a winner take all? The labels will do anything to prevent another Apple arising including backing any upstart that wants to challenge the big players. When you are just a middle man it is hard to create a monopoly.

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> Is there any reason to think that this market is a winner take all?

I personally doubt it. Exceedingly few markets are winner-take-all. Plus, monthly subscribers are "sticky", so they're not going to leave overnight if one competitor gains a slight edge, and everyone else will have a chance to catch up.

Your point about the labels and streaming services as middle men is a good one too. Labels own all the content, so they have a lot of power to influence the market as well.

That entirely depends on how the power balance between content owners and streaming services develops. If labels deliberately protect themselves from a streaming monopoly by fostering competition via good deals for smaller competitors it might become a very balanced market. But if a dominant streaming service manages to press for better deals than smaller competitors, then it could be very much winner-takes-all (with some irrelevant indie for indies sake alternatives sprinkled in between). Labels might actually decide to deliberately let a monopoly happen, to keep the total annual "music tax" per listener high. Spotify is in a business where more hinges on smoky backroom deals than in arms manufacture.

I can’t see the labels being keen to let any one service get a monopoly as it risks them being played off against each other like Apple did to Sony a few years back. I do agree that the music industry is incredibly opaque and how really knows what is going on.

How could a streaming monopolist play content monopolists? There is only one place to call if you want to license a given artist and fans will tell you that you can't substitute one rapper with a different one. The music business is more about identity than about chords and rhythms. "Sorry, no hits for your search term The Beatles, but try this nice, barely used Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, you will like it because it is also old and by a famous person with a funny haircut", that won't work.

Only independent labels without established names, who need the exposure from streaming as much as they need the money would suffer from a streaming monopoly.

You need to have all, or almost all music, for people to sign up with you. I wouldn't be a paying spotify customer if it wasn't because they had almost all the music I wanted.

What we really need are a change to copyright laws that requires a mandatory uniform-fee-only streaming license for all music, tv and movies.

But they don't have all and never will. That's why I will never pay them. For me, I already have all.

Not with consumers like you they won't. If you're expecting a market to grow from nothing to mature without paying consumers until they're perfect nothing will change nor evolve.

You vote with your dollar by supporting the kinds of market you would like.

I started using Spotify in 2008 because the concept was what I envisioned for the future and iTunes was an awful practice in buying music. I thought I'd still "download" music on the side, but I honestly never felt the need for it. Sure Spotify doesn't have _everyting_, but it has an impressively huge amount of fringe music that I would never have expected and more than enough music for me to listen to until I die. And it grows.

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