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On the other hand, Spotify is objectively a better offering for what most music listeners want -- access to music.

They don't want to think about whether a particular song or artist is on a particular CD.

They want to play one of anything, as the mood strikes them.

Generally, they're probably fine with leasing (cheaper) access to (more) music, versus (more expensively) owning (less) music. Ownership just doesn't confer enough utility to make up the price gap.

I'm as anti never-ownership-trend as you'll find, but it's hard to fault Spotify for "winning", given the huge disparity in user utility.

Did you not live through the iTunes era or something it addresses every one of your points here

I fault mankind for being uncritically thinking to let Spotify win

But then again “mainstream” mankind made Taylor Swift and Kanye West billionaires.

You mean the iTunes era that was dictated by fiat because Jobs had enough power to unilaterally bend the industry to his will?

Autocracy is great... as long as the autocratic is good.

But I'd worry about how that would have gone when Apple ran out of growth and needed to juice their revenue.

No idea what you’re on about

You can load a CD you bought at the store into iTunes and the bytes are yours for all time

Not sure what autocracy has to do with it

Assumed your point was the per-track pricing that iTunes ushered in, rather than the system as a whole.

That's closest to the Spotify user experience.

However, it never would have happened if Apple hadn't had such a dominant position in the market (at the time, iPod) that they could force record companies into that deal.

This is a great point. In addition, Spotify creates a much more distributed market for artists. I've found literally thousands of small independent artists that I would have never found through the filter of CD shops and record labels. Their service is curation, and it helps everyone (consumers and artists) -- except the record labels who lose market control.

I eyeroll every time I see someone here say "all the consumers are stupid because they don't behave exactly like I want them to behave, and I must be the right one"

> Their service is curation, and it helps everyone (consumers and artists) -- except the record labels who lose market control.

I do worry about the centralization of the marketplace around Spotify. "The king is dead" -> "Long live the king" etc.

IMHO, it'd be much healthier if streaming revenue sharing operated on a FRAND model, where non-Spotify entrants were guaranteed access to Spotify revenue-sharing licensing pricing with the content owners, by using a standard formula.

Maybe that's the way it does work? National music licensing law in the streaming area is something I'm not overly familiar with.

That's a good argument. I'd concede this is a potential risk / concern that we'd want to mitigate in the long term

> Nowadays, I’m paying an ever increasing sum of money for music I’ll never own a copy of outright, to primarily pay off the Spotify platform’s AWS bill, c-level salaries, shareholders, and engineer salaries. Then basically the same thing for the record companies. And whatever detritus scraps are left over, dangle in front of the artist and make him do something embarrassing for it.

Spotify only had one price increase in its history and it was in 2023.

Also, check the financial reports, 70+% of all revenue goes to paying royalties, so the majority of the revenue is disbursed to labels, not the scraps, the scraps are paying for engineers, editors, designers, lots of legal resources (try dealing with licencing across 100+ markets), all the infrastructure, C-level, and so on.

Just calling out because I do agree there are many problems with subscriptions in general but not the ones you brought up.

What is this "ever increasing sum of money"? Recording industry revenues peaked in the CD era in the late 90s/early 00s. People pay significantly less money on average today and have access to infinitely more music. And the "purchase and own forever" model you mention hasn't gone anywhere. Everyone is free to buy MP3s/CDs/Vinyl or whatever else. It just doesn't make sense for the majority of people, because no one wants to listen to a single album on repeat for a month.

Most people have fairly limited musical tastes - definable as "liking the stuff that was popular in high school and maybe a couple new songs a year that reminds them of high school"

Assuming that most people have fairly stable lives they probably bought all their CDs some time in their 20s and maybe have to 1.25 cds a year to make up for wear and tear of their old music and the occasional new album.

For users with that kind of musical taste Streaming services are clearly a big increase in cost, offering no extra value.

For users with a wide ranging musical taste - which might be more applicable to younger generations who have been taught that access to all the world's music is a possibility - obviously the Streaming model is a superior value.

And the artist earns significantly less as a consequence, hence the emphasis placed (from literally every artist I’ve spoken to or heard o speak on it) “you don’t make money from album sales, you hardly break even from touring, you basically need a side-business now”

Or maybe it’s actually a net healthy thing—that is, demanding musical artists be lifelong paupers of the most fundamental degree—because music is an unproductive venture and starving artists make objectively better art.

That's an empirical question: do small independent artists make more or less via the streaming model than they do via "buy CDs in shops" model?

I don't know the answer, but I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that small artists were making a better living via local CD shops (with limited inventory and zero economic incentive to push smaller, unknown artists).

> does NOT remotely justify the additional cost...

The recommendation system is amazing and totally worth an additional cost to me.

> You paid $10-20 one time and the music was durably yours forever.

I'm old enough to have re purchased my music on three platforms: vinyl, CD, mp3. If you buy physical media you have the added cost of needing space for the stuff and needing to move it around with you. As for Mp3, they are the great but they made sharing so easy stealing music became a real problem.

I've found half a dozen or more artists through Spotify I never would have heard of otherwise. I've seen several lives shows with those groups. I've even purchased a vinyl or two from Spotify from those marketing emails they send out based on your listening. I pay less than $20/mo to Spotify directly but they are responsible for literally thousands of dollars of my money going to artists, producers, labels, etc. over the last several years that would not have happened without them. IMO whether artists made more in the 90s selling CDs for $34 ($17 in '95 adjusted for inflation) is irrelevant, if Spotify or similar systems didn't exist today they'd be making less than they are now due to piracy.

I can’t tell you how often I spent money on a cd as a teenager, and the rest of the songs on that cd were garbage. I love being able to sample on Spotify, I’ve found so much good music. There are still easy ways to get mp3s if you want to keep the songs.

Music industry revenue hit an all-time high in 2023; it didn't fully recover from what napster/etc did to it in the early 2000s, until this/last year. Interesting that Vinyl makes up like 10% of their revenue. But, streaming is 84%. These stats probably don't include things like show tickets/merch.

Seems to be not close to dying.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/18/23878916/riaa-music-indus...

How much of the $10 for a CD went to paying off the loan for the CD press? Or the transport costs of shipping boxes around? Or the built in cost for breakages?

Also, you know you can still buy CDs, right? Vinyl as well if you're a masochist.