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Comment by alehul | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading how Spotify charges ~equal to Netflix, and their expenses will likely be much lower due to not needing to fund 'originals' and all.

While Netflix's originals also offer a distinct advantage over their competitors and increases the cost of switching, Spotify will likely have a very profitable future as a company, and I'm curious to see if their market cap will ever approach that of Netflix.

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I was thinking that Spotify would actually need to go in the Netflix direction and have the music equivalent of "originals" (that is, signing artists and having their own label) because otherwise record companies would try to spin off their own services and take their content with them (which has happened in video streaming), or the moment Spotify gets too profitable they'll see an opportunity to increase content prices since they know Spotify can afford it.

The difference here is that presumably fewer record companies have the money to fund the development of their own streaming service. The movie industry has much bigger players in the game.

Additionally I don't think anybody's cracked the code on how to make reliably well-received music yet. You can't distract the audience with good visuals and special effects if the plot is no good like in a movie.

>The difference here is that presumably fewer record companies have the money to fund the development of their own streaming service.

They don't need it. With Apple Music, Google Play and Spotify majors can afford to destroy Spotify with royalties as they please, and users will just migrate to other platforms and continue to pay.

It's kinda funny once you think about it. Back in early 00's, when Napster appeared, everybody was "dude, record labels are dead, new business models, bla-bla-bla".

And now we are 18 years later, and majors are quite fine. And they did literally nothing for 18 years. No investments, no development, nothing. They just milked different internet services with their royalties.

> 18 years later, and majors are quite fine. And they did literally nothing for 18 years. No investments, no development, nothing.

Well, except enabling you to buy your music from anywhere, DRM-free, playable with the software of your choice.

Is it really their fault that an all you can eat service for 10 bucks doesn't actually feed anyone, including the artists and the platform itself? It's simply too cheap.

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