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Comment by sidkhanooja | Hacker News Reader

Personal anecdote, but it's nice to see the growing maturity of the Indian audience - no one in my circle of friends and family is complaining that big names such as Linkin Park, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay et al. and rock/metal biggies (Slipknot/Dream Theater/Pantera et al.) are missing. Growing tastes, perhaps?

And it's amazing to see Spotify grow so quickly. Almost all of the people I know (I'm guilty of the same) used a US free-tier account, and sideloaded modded applications to listen to Spotify. I used to think that was piracy as usual, but now all of us are on 1-year subscriptions. The price sensitivity ($9.99/month in US vs $1.68/month in India) does obviously make a difference.

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>Personal anecdote, but it's nice to see the growing maturity of the Indian audience - no one in my circle of friends and family is complaining that big names such as Linkin Park, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay et al. and rock/metal biggies (Slipknot/Dream Theater/Pantera et al.) are missing. Growing tastes, perhaps?

Or merely a circle of friends totally unrepresentative of mainstream Indian tastes?

More likely. Or they're listening to the Indian equivalents :)

OP, mainstream music is just that, mainstream, it's watered down precisely because most people like watered down music ;)

Slipknot, Dream Theater and Pantera are watered down? What?

And say what you will about their respective musical value, they’re not the top sellers/streamers for their genres in a way that merits comparison to Ed Sheeran.

I was obviously referring to the first part of the comment...

those are not mainstream, what... next thing you'll tell me liquid tension experiment is mainstream? people on this sub live in a different world apparently

So Spotify in India is missing a lot of the big-name artists? That's a little sad as I always felt one of the the big benefits of Spotify is they seem to have EVERYTHING. Video streaming services like Netflix are a joke in comparison.

There are three major music publishers (UMG, Sony, Warner). As long as you have contracts with them, you'll have nearly everything.

Spotify's not the only competing service that has almost everything. Tidal, Google Play Music, Apple Music, they've all managed to get a deal with those publishers. Smaller players like Deezer even manage to offer the same service to 180+ countries (compared to Spotify's 20).

Netflix and others would also have nearly everything if the majority of the movies was produced by three publishers.

> There are three major music publishers (UMG, Sony, Warner). As long as you have contracts with them, you'll have nearly everything.

If (i) you have mainstream taste and (ii) you're not in a market with a substantial domestic recorded music market like, oh I don't know, India, where the majors hold a minority of what people like to listen to.

> Video streaming services like Netflix are a joke in comparison.

Netflix realised quite rapidly that it was a fools errand to try to have everything.

Given the choice between paying top dollar for every blockbuster film (which engage people for two hours at a time), Netflix invested in TV series and producing its own material, which works out cheaper and keeps people watching for much much longer. Netflix's movie catalogue has shrunk since 2010 (mostly due to Epix moving its films over to Hulu), but the TV inventory has tripled.

Netflix also benefits from TV/movies being more fungible, and with a better long tail than music. If Netflix doesn't have a TV show or movie, you'll likely find something else you want to watch. If Spotify doesn't have Taylor Swift, it doesn't have Taylor Swift.

"Netflix also benefits from TV/movies being more fungible"

Is this really the case? I mean, is there any research on this? I would guess exactly opposite is the case: I personally don't care about background music in most situations, but if I'm watching a film for two hours, I'm going to be very selective.

That means that Netflix in its current state is useless for me. As much as I applaud them for some of their production, the combination of half-empty catalogue and forced subscription model is going in the exactly wrong direction. I would pay one-time fee for Roma. I would pay subscription for a good catalogue.

Now, I don't state that it's not the case that most consumers does not care about what they watch as much as they care about what they listen. I'm just interested in some empirical data on this.

I suppose it's different for different people - not everyone is using Spotify for 'background music', they might want to sit and listen to Taylor Swift (per above example) and if it's not on Spotify, it's just like Netflix not having the film we want to watch.

Also, I'm not sure if it releases everything as matter of routine, but Netflix certainly releases some of its original content on DVD/BD.

The way I see it, music is generally something you listen to multiple times, especially for favorite albums.

On the other hand, people don't re-watch movies and TV shows at nearly the same frequency. I may be wrong, but that's my observation based on myself and the people I know.

Funny, I would make the exact opposite argument. I can 'put up with' a lot of different music in the right general genre I'm in the mood for while doing other stuff (and if one song doesn't take my fancy I can either just skip it or wait 3 minutes for the next song), but if I'm going to invest 2-10 hours of focused attention on a TV show/movie then it better be what I actually want.

I agree. I'm constantly switching between Netflix, HBO and Viaplay (streaming service in the Nordics) when one of those has a show I want to watch next and the other ones don't have that exact show. I've also started to fall back to renting and (gasp) torrenting movies again because I usually first come up with a movie I want to watch and only then start browsing the services for that movie, not the other way around.

> I always felt one of the the big benefits of Spotify is they seem to have EVERYTHING

Really. Spotify's library is decent, but I find it is missing a fair bit of content that is available on youtube, etc

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