James Blake’s music subscription model is a fantasy that disadvantages fans and musicians

the idea of your public library being what you turn to for universal music access seems so much more interesting than it being dictated by the major labels and streaming services, who are going to try to reduce the cost of content at every turn to shape what you hear.

If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.

But this kind of love is rare nowadays. I often see record labels promote new artists for all sorts of gimmicky reasons—even labels I once trusted such as Deutsche Gr... See more

Take the music industry, for example. From Napster to the iTunes Music Store and now Spotify, the last two decades look a lot like an exercise in how to use internet platforms to effectively deny income to musicians while extracting maximum value in content and data.