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Comment by kurikuri | Hacker News Reader

This comparison doesn’t seem to address the issue of who you replied to. If I were running a streaming service, knew the business intimately, and still couldn’t figure out how Spotify had such an advantage against me, I would be both perplexed and need to admit defeat.

I wouldn’t have the same sentiment against YouTube music or Apple Music, because these are explicitly part of the same companies that host the marketplace.

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That’s true. But it also raises question about whether the marketplace should be able to advantage itself for its own applications in the first place? It’s “might is right” but is it ethical and will it create a better society? It seems consolidation is inevitable and meaningful competition impossible.

I mean, ultimately, if you run a marketplace without posted rules and only let your friends and your own self succeed, aren’t you at a minimum sort of cheating? Like a Vegas house who claims fairness but the house gets special odds?

Have you ever walked into any retailer that has house brands right next to name brands cheaper?

Yes and it is also a borderline thing to me. Amazon Basics does the same thing and it's pretty messed up that you can put a product in the same marketplace you control and run out the competition.

These walled gardens need to be opened up.

So would you rather pay $30 for Sudafed or buy the house brand for $15?

The fact remains that plenty of people prefer the name brand, and there's a type of 'fairness' baked in to this scenario as the house brands are very often packaged in a way that looks, simply, cheap; the stores are often paid by the brand name marketers for shelf space so they have a vested interest in not competing too hard with their house brand, so they package in a way which makes it look a bit second rate.

Retail shelf space is a constrained physical variable as opposed to screen space which is virtually unlimited. Putting own white label product on shelf incurs stocking and restocking costs as well as shelf space which could have been used to sale other branded products.

Apple/YouTube music not having any platform fee does give them an unfair advantage. Not sure how they rank in their own app stores in music categories though. Android user here so YouTube comes installed by default and even Yt music. Not sure if Apple music comes pre-installed as well. If it does, it does give another advantage to Apple.

And yet Spotify still has a larger market share.

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