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Comment by ethbr1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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