The Big Short of Streaming

Weird blog-rant. Had Spotify sided with Neil, the music hosted on their platform would still be "valueless". Neil was not pulling his music to protest for fair compensation for musicians. In fact Neil seems to care about that very little, as he has previously gone on record to say that performing artists should not even go on tour [1], the thing that in the before-times netted the vast majority of their income, so long as pandemic persists.

In fact it's kind of insulting to struggling musicians that this controversy has absolutely nothing to do with artist compensation, the lack of which being the primary controversy of the platform before this convenient dust-up.

1. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-con...

> When Daniel Ek, Martin Lorentzon, and others first developed Spotify, they famously did so by building on a collection of music they did not hold any rights to themselves.

> Spotify used the financial model of arbitrage to obtain a cheap if not free product – digital music – and resell it in a new context to realize profit.

I think this is assuming that since Spotify was prototyped with music from The Pirate Bay, it still has that model. It pays out 70%-ish of revenue to rightsholders. That's not "cheap if not free."

That's a clickbait headline for an article that has nothing to do with shorting. Of course it wasn't really about free speech for Spotify. They'd certainly have a lot more to lose if Rogan left than Neil Young. Keep on rockin in the officially recognized as acceptable world.

Not all streaming services are as anti-artist as Spotify. I’ve been using Tidal for a few years now, and while it doesn’t have all the integrations Spotify has, I’ll never switch back. It’s obvious from the app that they care about the artists… From the royalties, to the credits feature, to their master quality recordings, Tidal lifts the artists to the top. In Tidal, you can look up who was the sound engineer for your favorite track and see what else they engineered, which is awesome for discovering new music.

Spotify is pretty amazing as a company for how they managed to get 70% of their revenue to rights holders[1] I can't imagine this ratio could be easily surpassed by any physical music store chains, or any other tech company.

At the end of the day, people have a limited budget to spend on music. That isn't going to change. If the delivery isn't good enough, that money doesn't get spend by some folks and the delivery mechanism is handled by piracy. 70 percent is a pretty damn impressive ratio, I can see other folks entering into the market and spending that same amount on their AWS bill instead.

Secondly, there are some interesting findings[2] that combating and censoring misinformation doesn't actually do anything. It is interesting to see musicians demanding that Spotify do some action, without the effect of the action being scrutinized to the same level that Spotify is for not doing an action.

[1] https://freeyourmusic.com/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per...

[2]https://royalsociety.org/news/2022/01/scientific-misinformat...

We need public protocols for music and video and regulation to make all content available to everyone whilst cutting out the middle men. But unfortunately our governments are still just allowing monopolies to carry on leaving consumers with no real alternative.

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