I get that is what they are doing, I still don’t see the problem. Hopefully they will gradually cut out the record labels entirely, and pay the artists the full cut directly that is currently going mostly to the record label.
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.
The problem is that their automatic song selection now chooses songs based on what earns them money. Rather than their best guess of what people want to hear. This isn't disintermediating the record labels. It's taking audiences from real artists, and placing it with artists that have given up their rights to royalties.
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.
How big (and noticeable) does the reduction in quality need to be. Especially because spotify is such an easy platform.
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.)
> Hopefully they will gradually cut out the record labels entirely, and pay the artists the full cut directly that is currently going mostly to the record label
>Hopefully they will gradually cut out the record labels entirely, and pay the artists the full cut directly that is currently going mostly to the record label.
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?
The dominant platform might eventually cut out the labels and afterwards earn their margins.
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.
Not too long ago music fans were pretty much all agreed the record labels were mostly rent seekers stealing from artists. It seems wild to me that people are now angry that music streaming services are disrupting that and paying artists directly based on actual listens.
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.
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.