I was originally commenting on your statement from spotify's POV

> as they scale up they'll have more leverage with the rights holders

My comment was making the point that simply scaling Spotify does not solve their publisher/supplier costs because the publisher scales with Spotify.

Your response basically switched to the publisher's POV in talking about how publishers are incentivized to commoditize spotify's position in the market. (which is true, but not relevant here.)

I was just casually trying to imagine a scenario from Spotify's POV regarding how would they might gain leverage against publishers. IMO anything that involves labels seems like a fail.

Spotify's only path to success might be to offer some direct to consumer mechanism that eliminates the need of a label, even their own.