>Still waiting for competition to affect prices. Eg I would be happy to pay 5$/month for limited, ad free access to Spotify/ whatever, but 10$ seems excessive.
No competitor can offer $5/month unless the service is positioned as a loss leader. The overwhelming costs for streaming music is the licensing and royalties of music content. In other words, if Spotify paid their programmers half the market rate salaries to save overhead costs, they still couldn't sell online music for $5/month.
If "loss leader" is a legitimate business strategy, it means only the big companies with offsetting non-music revenue like Amazon/Google/Apple can offer cheap streaming music. Companies with music-only revenue like Spotify/Pandora/Tidal would not be able to compete with that.
Are you comparing the price of Spotify to the price of Netflix? If so, it's not a remotely fair comparison. The percent of mainstream music Spotify doesn't have is miniscule to the amount of mainstream video Netflix lacks. Take Netflix and add in the cost of premium movie channels -- HBO, Starz, Showtime, etc. and you start approaching a modern catalog comparable to Spotify.
Your monthly fees are now approaching $100 per month. However, you're still left with three gaps -- old movies, recently released DVDs, and movies in theaters. Considering all this, plus Sean Parker's idea to start renting new releases for 24 hours costs $50 per movie, it's pretty fair to say that Spotify is significantly cheaper than the equivalent in videos.
But keep in mind that recent video releases are usually paywalled by movie theaters or pay channels while music is available legitimately on the radio and various online outlets. Also keep in mind that the typical cost of production for an hour of music is significantly less than an hour of video, not to mention the storage and bandwidth differences.
No competitor can offer $5/month unless the service is positioned as a loss leader. The overwhelming costs for streaming music is the licensing and royalties of music content. In other words, if Spotify paid their programmers half the market rate salaries to save overhead costs, they still couldn't sell online music for $5/month.
If "loss leader" is a legitimate business strategy, it means only the big companies with offsetting non-music revenue like Amazon/Google/Apple can offer cheap streaming music. Companies with music-only revenue like Spotify/Pandora/Tidal would not be able to compete with that.