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Comment by PolygonSheep | Hacker News Reader

> Now that digital is ‘refragmenting’ it would be funny if the red disks came back to get around all these silos.

I'm not an IP law expert, but does anyone know why fragmentation isn't such a problem with music? You never hear someone complaining that they have to subscribe to eight different music streaming services to hear all the popular songs. It seems the big music streaming services all have pretty much all the popular artists and you can just pick one and listen to all the hits, regardless of which label they're on.

Why isn't it this way for video content?

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There are only three companies that control distribution of almost all popular music. (Universal, Sony and Warner) Once you get outside of artists and genres published by these four (e.g. smaller foreign artists, very small niche genres, small indie artists) streaming options decrease.

I suspect Apple snapped up some very long rights early on which means they’re not going to bother trying to compete directly as they’d only have their own songs.

Same way that a bunch of studios waited for their Netflix/Prime contracts to wind down before opening their own streaming service.

In the US, the music subscription services get blanket licenses (from the MLC for mechanical rights and from the PRO’s for performing rights).

It’s different but similar around the world, but there is no long term rights securitization going on.

Music streaming could have gone the fragmented route. The major services were doing all sorts of exclusives. Two things stopped it (the first being it was bad business, the second being the mail in the coffin):

1. Exclusives were very expensive and not linked to growing subscribers. This is true within the other services but can be seen publicly by the failure of Tidal.

2. Frank Ocean screwed Universal Music (well played), resulting in the CEO declaring an end to exclusives [0].

[0]: https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/frank-ocean-endle...

I've heard people complaining on this site about streaming sites having or not having particular indie and obscure artists. They usually complain about YouTube making videos in playlists disappear as well.

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