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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The main reason is that licensing works totally differently for music. For music, you go to a central licensing source and pay for the license. They will license to anyone with money.

For movies, you have to negotiate separately with every movie producer for every title.

In other words, to start a music service, you need money. To start a movie service, you need money and connections to every Hollywood studio.

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The major DSPs in the music space have to license each music company separately. YouTube, Amazon, Soundcloud, Spotify, Apple - all have individual dealings with the majors and with groups of or individual indies. It's definitely not as simple as requesting a blanket license for all music everywhere and paying a single fee.

Sure, there are three major music companies and six major film studios plus a bunch of major tv networks / distributors but it's still a long set of negotiations.

I think the difference is that the music companies understand the value of each service having ubiquitous access to every piece of music. UMG's decision to stop their artists agreeing exclusives with single platforms demonstrates this to some extent.

In other words, licensing for movies suck and we need to force a change so they can work like music.

But with music the creators don't get paid squat for their content. The middle men make way too much. Part of that is because music is a background thing that is on a lot and repeated where a movies tend to be one-time.

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