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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

The technology had nothing to do with Spotify winning. There were probably hundreds of startups that built cool music tech but they all failed because they couldn't get the licenses. As far as I know the true story about why the RIAA gave Spotify the green light after saying no to so many before them hasn't been told.

Edited for duh...

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> There were probably hundreds of startups that built cool music tech but they all failed because they couldn't get the licenses. As far as I know the true story of why the MPAA gave Spotify the green light after saying no to so many before them.

It helps that Spotify is (partly) owned by the record labels: http://www.swedishwire.com/jobs/680-record-labels-part-owner...

It's what makes shutting down Grooveshark and going after other music services so ridiculous - it's not a matter of wanting to combat "piracy" as much as it is about wanting to make sure that their favored candidate wins, instead of an independent one.

Again, remember that the RIAA currently has authority not just over artists signed to major labels, but over artists signed to independent labels as well[0], so they really do truly have cartel-like power, and they are clearly not interested in giving that up.

[0] A subsidiary of the RIAA has the sole legal authority to collect royalties on behalf of all artists, and then artists can request remittance of payments from this subsidiary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, independent artists report mixed results with actually getting the RIAA's subsidiary[1] to pay them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundExchange#Authority

[1] Technically SoundExchange is now a 501(c)3 and no longer owned by the RIAA, to make them appear more "independent", but this is a change in name only.

Yeah, this article is written as if the hard part of creating Spotify was figuring out that people wanted cheap streaming music (obvious), and then building it (difficult, but many groups could replicate it). I suspect that it was much harder to obtain the licenses, and that's the story I actually want to hear.

The truth is that Daniel Ek met the major 4/5 labels at the same time and showed them their (at the time pirate) software. They said - yes - if we can own 75-80% of you. The truth is that the major labels own about 80% of Spotify between them - it wasn't the RIAA.

No, the record companies own about 20% of Spotify. The rest is VC and founder owned.

You're right. Having a music player play songs fast is nice but the record label deals in essence gave Spotify monopolistic advantages only other streaming companies could compete with. (Pandora, iHeartRadio, etc)

These same content licensing advantages are given to Netflix and Hulu.

FYI - Hulu is owned by Fox, Disney and NBC.

Spotify is partially owned by Sony, Universal, Warner, and EMI.

You need to use common sense when you enter an industry about your strategy. It can't all revolve around great tech.

Not to mention the fact that besides the basic premise of the product, Spotify manages to be shite at nearly every bit of functionality they offer. Navigation, discovery, organisation, it's all awful. And now that they've dropped the API, there's no third party apps to compensate for it. It has that one killer feature, but sucks at everything else.

I'm sure the back end is technically awesome, but I really hope Spotify gets some competition from a party that actually cares about music and the user experience.

Spotify could be so much, much better. Instead they're just lazily exploiting their licensing advantage and what is effectively a monopoly. (Pandora isn't available where I live, nor in most parts of the world.)

(To be fair, half the mess the UI is is probably caused by pressure from the music industry to peddle their crap regardless of what the user actually wants. At least that's what I hope, otherwise Spotify is even worse than I thought.)

Dropping third party apps was beyond dumb. I no longer have any reason to give them my money.

Exactly.

If I created a service that allowed unlimited streaming of the latest movie releases for $10 a month / ad supported , pretty sure it would be pretty popular.

RIAA.

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