Nobody Will Tell You the Ugly Reason Apple Acquired a Classical Music Label

This decision-making around how to price digitally scarce music and art illuminated to me that in a commodified streaming economy, most musicians don’t have the ability to set the price of their own creative output in the first place, and may be leaving money on the table in the process.

In other words, streaming is a lot more profitable for all the actual value creators after we bypass these technopolies.

More fundamentally, though, for both music and books, most of the arguments and questions are music industry questions and book industry questions, not tech or software questions. Spotify is suing Apple over the App Store commission rules, but otherwise, all the Spotify questions are music questions. Why don’t artists make more from streaming? Ask ... See more

And so what you've ended up with, not surprisingly, is a few key players that happen to own the majority of the IP that is kind of a must have in this industry to have a product offering and a handful of distributors that have gotten scale on distribution of great user experiences like a Spotify, Amazon, a YouTube, whoever you might want to think a... See more