People can listen to whatever they want- artists that are not being listened to aren’t being stolen from if the money is instead going to other artists that are being listened to. If people don’t care who the artist is but like what they hear, that seems great.
That isn't disintermediating recordlabels. That is just serving customers worse music. Heck, it is disintermediating artists from their audience.
There is no music monopoly and customers have a choice in which music they listen to and what service they use (Spotify, Apple, Google/Youtube, Amazon, Bandcamp, buying CDs).
Surely if users get served worse music, they will dislike it, and move to another service or another way to listen to music.
Changing to another streaming service requires learning a new app, moving over all playlists, and likely means still a pretty bad music suggestion service. Because spotify has a pretty good recommendation engine.
it's not for me. YT was. SoundCloud too. (Now SoundCloud also wants folks to sign in aggressively. I think you can't fast-forward otherwise, but at least listening works without signing in.)
Also ... you can upload to YT and SoundCloud, but not to Spotify. So their catalog is just meh. (So even if their recommendations are great in some genres, in general they are not for everyone.)
for now. Spotify is a market leader with 32%, though.
>if users get served worse music, they will dislike it
how many more twitters, facebooks, and youtubes do we need to show that this is not historically the case?
Ok stop it. This is too much.
nah, they will cut out the artist when they figure out how to AI generate this process. It's just begging to be automated.
> artists that are not being listened to aren’t being stolen from if the money is instead going to other artists that are being listened to
you see no conflict of interest with Spofity potentially paying specific "studios" to mass produce slop? The platform that has control over algoithms of what to listen to?
That's why (I assume, I'm not in the music biz) labels stay relevant for now, because they act or sell themselves to artists as some kind of union to protect them from draconian streaming services. But I might be totally wrong on this.
Some really do function like unions: groups of artists sharing the functional/procedural/admin burden that comes with keeping their publishing as Saint Francis of Zappa advocated, or paying someone who cares (perhaps a small indie record shop owner) to do that for them as a side gig.
Some are little more than asset classes for private equity at this point.
that's very likely not the case. hence the issue.
Even if it was, keep in mind these are focused in Sweden. This model may only get worse if an american "label" tries this.
the confidence made in this statement is jarring